Walter Scott's Books : Reading the Waverley Novels 9780415789684, 9781315212197

Citation preview

The Abbotsford Library

This page intentionally left blank

Walter Scott’s Books

Walter Scott’s Books is an approachable introduction to the Waverley Novels. Drawing on substantial research in Scott’s intertextual sources, it offers a fresh supplement to existing readings where the thematic and theoretical are the norm. Avoiding jargon, and moving briskly, it tackles the vexed question of Scott’s ‘circumbendibus’ style head on, suggesting that it is actually one of the most exciting aspects of his fiction: indeed, what Ian Duncan has called the ‘elaborately literary narrative’, at first sight a barrier, is in a sense what the novels are primarily ‘about’. The book aims to show how inventive, witty, and entertaining Scott’s richly allusive style is; how he keeps his varied readership on board with his own inexhaustible variety; and how he allows proponents of a wide range of positions to have their say, using a detached, ironic, but never cynical narrative voice to undermine the more rigid and inhumane rhetorics. J. H. Alexander is Honorary Reader in English at the University of Aberdeen.

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

14 Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family Monica Flegel 15 Queer Victorian Families Curious Relations in Literature Edited by Duc Dau and Shale Preston 16 Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle Libidinal Lives Edited by Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates, and Patricia Pulham 17 Walt Whitman and British Socialism ‘The Love of Comrades’ Kirsten Harris 18 Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture Writing Materiality Sabine Schülting 19 Walter Scott’s Books Reading the Waverley Novels J. H. Alexander 20 Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity Subjects, Texts, and Print Culture Edited by Annika Bautz and Kathryn Gray 21 The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World Laura White 22 The Unknown Relatives The Catholic as the Other in the Victorian Novel Monika Mazurek

Walter Scott’s Books Reading the Waverley Novels

J. H. Alexander

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of J. H. Alexander to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-0-4157-8968-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-21219-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Prefatory Notes Acknowledgements

ix xv

1 Introduction

1

2 Resources

7

3 Style

21

4 Strategies

55

5 Mottoes

83

6 Intertexts

116

7 Novels

157

8 Envoi

200

Index of Passages Discussed General Index

205 225

This page intentionally left blank

Prefatory Notes

The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels The Edinburgh Edition (eewn), to which this study is keyed throughout, is based on the first-edition text of each novel, corrected principally from the manuscripts. The introductions and notes provided by Scott for the ‘Magnum Opus’ collected edition towards the end of his life occupy the last two of the thirty volumes (numbered 25a and 25b). This study confines itself almost entirely to the texts and editorial material of the novels as found in Volumes 1 to 23, four of which are divided to accommodate two novels published together. The shorter fiction (Volume 24) and the Magnum material are both fascinating in themselves, but twenty-seven volumes are more than enough to be going on with. The titles of novels cited are normally given in the text, with eewn volume, page, and line numbers. (The eewn does not print line numbers, but it will be helpful to remember that there are usually forty-three lines on each page.) Since the study is intended to be used in conjunction with the Edinburgh Edition, the reader is referred to the relevant volumes for full details of the principal sources, usually discussed in the Historical Note and included in the list of abbreviated forms of reference at the beginning of the explanatory notes. Page references to the explanatory notes are included only where they are quoted or otherwise specifically referred to in the study, though it will often be found helpful to consult them for passages discussed. Readers using editions other than the eewn, which will almost invariably be based on the Magnum text, can find out in which chapter passages quoted or referred to occur by consulting the index of references to the novels at the end of this book. The address of a website containing full sortable online listings of textual allusions in the novels, compiled by the present author, including an indication of differences between quoted passages in the novels and the originals (which the eewn does not routinely record), can be found at the end of these prefatory notes. The statistics in the study are based on these listings: apart from the smallest numbers the figures are rounded and should be regarded as indicative, since it is impossible to determine exactly what constitutes a single allusion.

x  Prefatory Notes In the list that follows the novels marked with an asterisk have also been published by Penguin Books in their Penguin Classics series, with the eewn texts, critical introductions, and simplified editorial apparatus. 1 *Waverley [1814], ed. P. D. Garside 2 *Guy Mannering [1815], ed. P. D. Garside 3 *The Antiquary [1816], ed. David Hewitt 4a The Black Dwarf [1816], ed. P. D. Garside 4b *The Tale of Old Mortality [1816], ed. Douglas Mack Rob Roy [1818], ed. David Hewitt 5 The Heart of Mid-Lothian [1818], ed. David Hewitt and Alison 6 Lumsden 7a *The Bride of Lammermoor [1819], ed. J. H. Alexander 7b A Legend of the Wars of Montrose [1819], ed. J. H. Alexander 8 *Ivanhoe [1820], ed. Graham Tulloch The Monastery [1820], ed. Penny Fielding 9 10 The Abbot [1820], ed. Christopher Johnson 11 *Kenilworth [1821], ed. J. H. Alexander 12 The Pirate [1822], ed. Mark Weinstein and Alison Lumsden 13 The Fortunes of Nigel [1822], ed. Frank Jordan 14 Peveril of the Peak [1822], ed. Alison Lumsden  uentin Durward [1823], ed. J. H. Alexander and G. A. M. 15 Q Wood 16 Saint Ronan’s Well [1824], ed. Mark Weinstein 17 *Redgauntlet [1824], ed. G. A. M. Wood with David Hewitt 18a The Betrothed [1825], ed. J. B. Ellis with others 18b The Talisman [1825], ed. J. B. Ellis with others 19 Woodstock [1826], ed. Tony Inglis with others 20 *Chronicles of the Canongate [1827], ed. Claire Lamont 21 The Fair Maid of Perth [1828], ed. A. D. Hood and Donald Mackenzie 22 Anne of Geierstein [1829], ed. J. H. Alexander 23a Count Robert of Paris [1831], ed. J. H. Alexander 23b Castle Dangerous [1831], ed. J. H. Alexander 24 The Shorter Fiction, ed. Graham Tulloch and Judy King 25a I ntroductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Waverley to A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, ed. J. H. Alexander with others 25b I ntroductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Ivanhoe to Castle Dangerous, ed. J. H Alexander with others The numbering reflects the original publication history. The Black Dwarf and The Tale of Old Mortality (as Old Mortality) originally appeared together as Tales of my Landlord. The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (as A Legend of Montrose) appeared as Tales of my Landlord (Third Series), the second series having

Prefatory Notes  xi been totally occupied by The Heart of Mid-Lothian. The Betrothed and The Talisman appeared as Tales of the Crusaders. Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous appeared as Tales of my Landlord (Fourth and Last Series).

Bibliographies There exist several bibliographies of critical publications on Scott and his works. Indispensable listings up to 1990, with brief indications of the contents of each item, can be found in three books: James Clarkson Corson, A Bibliography of Sir Walter Scott: A Classified and Annotated List of Books and Articles Relating to his Life and Works 1797–1940 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1943); Jill Rubenstein, Sir Walter Scott: A Reference Guide (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1978), covering publications between 1932 and 1977; and Jill Rubenstein, Sir Walter Scott: An Annotated Bibliography of Scholarship and Criticism 1975–1990 (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, Occasional Paper Number 11 [Aberdeen, 1994]). For criticism published in the 1990s one has to make do with the bare listings in the electronic database Literature Online . Annual lists with brief annotations from 2000 to the present can be found in the invaluable Walter Scott Digital Archive prepared by Paul Barnaby and hosted by Edinburgh University Library : this site has several useful indexes to the critical material and much else of interest. Each of Jill Rubenstein’s two volumes includes an introduction with a survey of critical trends during the years covered, and they have been joined by three more recent overviews: Harry E. Shaw’s Introduction to his edited volume Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996); Fiona Robertson’s ‘Walter Scott’ in Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 221–45; and Evan Gottlieb’s survey of ‘Materials’ constituting the first part of his Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels, co-edited with Ian Duncan (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009).

Introductory Reading Although many of the monographs and articles on the Waverley Novels are of high quality, none is a self-evident choice for those approaching Scott for the first time. Thomas Crawford’s brief Scott (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1965; rev. edn Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982) is a stimulating introduction to the man and his works. Specifically on the novels four readable studies, also from the 1960s, have acquired a sort of classic status: Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); Francis R. Hart, Scott’s

xii  Prefatory Notes Novels: The Plotting of Historic Survival (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966); A. O. J. Cockshut, The Achievement of Walter Scott (London: Collins, 1969); and Robert C. Gordon, Under Which King? A Study of the Scottish Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969). More recent books tend to be narrower in their focus, and addressed to advanced students, but for the early novels one can recommend Jane Millgate’s magisterial Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), and for a lucid feminist contextualisation Ina Ferris’s The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). In Walter Scott and the Limits of Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) Alison Lumsden makes use of the discoveries of the Edinburgh Edition in a series of challenging theoretical and practical insights. Graham Tulloch’s The Language of Walter Scott: A Study of his Scottish and Period Language (London: André Deutsch, 1980) provides a thoroughly readable expert linguistic overview. Some readers may find a congenial way in to the novels as nationalist rather than unionist texts in Julian Meldon D’Arcy’s lively and provocative Subversive Scott: The Waverley Novels and Scottish Nationalism (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2005). For those wanting to sample a variety of critics in a single volume there are several useful collections: Walter Scott: Modern Judgements, ed. D. D. Devlin (London: Macmillan, 1968); Scott’s Mind and Art, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969); Sir Walter Scott: The Long-Forgotten Melody, ed. Alan Bold (London: Vision Press, 1983); Harry E. Shaw’s Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels already mentioned; and The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott, ed. Fiona Robertson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Although its emphasis is avowedly pedagogic, the 2009 symposium edited by Gottlieb and Duncan mentioned above can be especially warmly recommended.

Abbreviations Carnival

eewn Gottlieb

Scott in Carnival: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, Edinburgh, 1991, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1993). The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, ed. David Hewitt with others, 30 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993–2012). Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels, ed. Evan Gottlieb and Ian Duncan (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009).

Prefatory Notes  xiii Hayden Influence

Jeffares Journal Letters Lockhart Millgate ODEP Reed Tulloch

Scott: The Critical Heritage, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). Scott and his Influence: The Papers of the Aberdeen Scott Conference, 1982, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1983). Scott’s Mind and Art, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969). The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson and others, 12 vols (London: Constable, 1932–37). J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 7 vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1837). Jane Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984). The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 3rd edn, rev. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). The Plays of William Shakespeare … With the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators, 5th edn, rev. Isaac Reed, 21 vols (London: J. Johnson etc., 1803). Graham Tulloch, The Language of Walter Scott: A Study of his Scottish and Period Language (London: André Deutsch, 1980).

References to Shakespeare are to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (London and Glasgow, 1951, frequently reprinted).

Ellipses Unless otherwise indicated all ellipses in this study are editorial.

Associated Website Full listings of allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, other authors, proverbs, and anonymous works, compiled by the author of the present study, can be found at , click Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels. A list of the chapter mottoes, with details of their appearance in manuscript or proof and brief indications of how each motto relates to the main text, can be found on the same website.

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgements

The present study depends very largely on the work carried out by the editors of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (General Editor David Hewitt), published in 30 volumes by Edinburgh University Press between 1993 and 2012. Material is taken freely from the editorial matter in the relevant volumes, usually without specific acknowledgement. The author is immensely grateful to his editorial colleagues for their help and their friendship over the years, and also to the eewn’s expert advisers and the many contributing libraries and their staff, especially the Bodleian Library, the British Library, and the National Library of Scotland. Warm thanks are due to the Routledge reviewers for very helpful comments, and to the editorial and production team, especially Jennifer Abbott and Assunta Petrone. The photograph of the Abbotsford library is included as frontispiece by kind permission of Andrea Longson, ­Senior Librarian at the Advocates Library, and the Faculty of Advocates Abbotsford Collection Trust.

This page intentionally left blank

1 Introduction

In The Philosophy of Literary Form, first published in 1941, Kenneth Burke wrote: Where does the drama get its materials? From the ‘unending conversation’ that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.1 For more than fifty years the present author has had the privilege and pleasure of participating in diverse discussions of the Waverley Novels. The many books and hundreds of articles produced during that time, the sequence of international Scott conferences since the bicentenary of his death in 1971, the pedagogic sessions, the countless exchanges postal and electronic with colleagues and friends working on the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels – all have been part of the ‘unending conversation’, to use Kenneth Burke’s expression, that began as soon as Waverley appeared in 1814. Most criticism of Scott’s fiction may be broadly characterised as thematic or theoretical. His novels abound in puzzles and ambiguities, challenging readers to bring new interpretations as their contribution to the creative mental strife. His ability to give voice to a wide variety of attitudes, and to his own conflicting emotions and ideas, means that very little is straightforward in his work, distinctions are seldom black

2 Introduction and white. Critics who maintain that (for example) the Waverley Novels are really about Scott’s own time rather than the past, or that he was a covert nationalist, are not perverse. 2 They may be one-sided, or exaggerated, but the texts provide them with substantial evidence to support their cases, and those who disagree will often find their own responses sharpened and rendered more alert to the omnipresent ambiguities. The polyphonic character of the novels, allowing many powerful conflicting voices to be heard, has made them particularly suited to analysis drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin: the papers of the fourth international conference at Edinburgh in 1991 were published under the title Scott in Carnival, drawing attention to the dominant tone of the occasion. This emphasis has continued into the present century. So, for example, Fiona Robertson writes in 2006: ‘In all Scott’s fictions, an ostensibly, often officiously moderating narratorial voice makes fanatical discourse of all kinds seem alien, but this moderating voice is always undermined by patterns of imagery, intricate alliances between unexpected parts of the plot, and by disconcertingly casual, distancing conclusions. The tale always says more than the teller’.3 And so Alison Lumsden observes in 2010 that in Waverley ‘while the voices of Jacobite dissent are seemingly silenced at the end of the novel, this is disrupted by the power which is given to them in the main body of the narrative. … Repeatedly Scott’s texts refuse to settle down into any straightforward closure but, on the contrary, erupt out of their apparent conclusions to suggest alternative possibilities’.4 Ceaseless polyphony inevitably leads to ceaseless debate. Examination of the thematic and theoretical issues raised by the Waverley Novels is of absorbing interest, endlessly challenging, and it will no doubt continue in all time to come. But the dominance of these issues in critical discourse has meant that another complementary way of approaching the works has not often received the attention it merits. Frederick A. Pottle has observed that for Scott fiction ‘is make-believe and amusement’.5 Scott stressed the importance for the novel of ‘giving pleasure’, maintaining that ‘of this species of light literature it may be said – tout genre est permis, hors le genre ennuyeux’.6 Only the boring is unacceptable. True, he recognised the importance of the moral dimension in fiction, albeit with the important qualification that ‘the direct and obvious moral to be deduced from a fictitious narrative, is of much less consequence to the public, than the mode in which the story is treated in the course of its details’.7 But without the giving of pleasure, moral effect would go for nothing. The first chapter of Waverley ends with this statement: Some favourable opportunities of contrast have been afforded me, by the state of society in the northern part of the island at the period of my history, and may serve at once to vary and to illustrate the moral lessons which I would willingly consider as the most important part

Introduction  3 of my plan, although I am sensible how short these will fall of their aim, if I shall be found unable to mix them with amusement, – a task not quite so easy in this critical generation as it was “Sixty Years since.” (1: 6.5–12) Scott was intent on providing his very diverse readership with enjoyable textural experiences, constantly varied so as to avoid the cardinal sin of being boring. In comparison with the somewhat daunting bulk of criticism devoted to thematic and theoretic issues very little attention has been paid to the marvellously rich texture of the novels, responsible in large measure though it is for the pleasure they afford, their peculiar ‘jouissance du texte’. This book aims to explore that gap, though hardly to fill it, homing in particularly on Scott’s pervasive use of intertextual allusions. It has in mind students approaching the Waverley Novels for the first time and wanting suggestions about things to look out for. But seasoned readers may well find in it a fresh perspective. Much of the criticism drawn on in the present study is not taken from the most commonly cited writers. When looking for stimulating textural comments it is often useful to go back to the original reviewers, for example. Although they tend to concentrate on characterisation, the depiction of manners, and the relationship between history and fiction, they have many suggestive and perceptive observations on the nature and effectiveness of Scott’s distinctive texture.8 In more recent times, similar issues have been taken up in a number of articles, and (usually incidentally) in monographs. It can hardly be denied that for many modern readers the characteristic texture of Scott’s work can be a barrier to enjoyment rather than a source of delight. His bookish, persistently allusive, sometimes pedantic style can appear forbidding. From their first appearance to the present the novels have been reworked to make them more readily accessible: there have been abbreviated versions, comic strips and booklets, dramatisations, and film and television productions. There is nothing wrong with that. At the most basic level any Scott is better than no Scott, and the adaptations can be responsively creative. But much of the marvellous variety of his fiction, much of its vigour, much of its sheer fun, is to be found in its dense allusiveness, in the elaborate prose, and in the seemingly endless variety of the games he plays for his own entertainment and that of his audience. The present study offers an invitation to confront the textural challenges head on, rather than minimising them or trying to sidestep them altogether. Graham Tulloch, to whom the present writer owes a great deal, has observed that ‘our awareness of the sources of [Scott’s] borrowings can give us pleasure, but it is not central to our reading and understanding of the novels’.9 But if a primary purpose of the novels is to give pleasure that is surely too severe (or perhaps too modest) a position.

4 Introduction In encouraging readers to address general stylistic issues, and to move to intertextual specifics, this book suggests that a recognition of the centrality of textual allusion is essential for the full enjoyment of Scott’s fiction. Certainly a helping hand will often be needed. The explanatory notes in the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels are designed to provide exactly that. They will go a long way towards putting the modern reader in the position of the most informed and inward of Scott’s original audience, at times indeed in the position of Scott himself. On occasion readers will even be privy to relevant information unknown to the novelist. No one, not even Scott, can understand everything. With texts as allusive as Scott’s there is always a danger that some readers may feel excluded. This must always have been a possibility (with those unable to follow his Scots speakers, or his Latin tags and quotations, for example). As we shall see, Scott often plays on coded speech used by characters to include or exclude hearers belonging or not belonging to their particular sociocultural circle. Sometimes too he will share a reference or a joke with a limited circle of readers, and part of their enjoyment will be an appreciation that they are part of that circle and most readers are not. But Scott was commercially aware, and he knew full well he had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by excluding large groups of potential consumers on a regular basis. He was usually careful to keep his ordinary readers (mostly English) on board while stimulating the more learned and affording satisfaction to native Scots speakers. Of course with the passage of two centuries there are references immediately understandable by his original readers but a good deal less familiar to many nowadays (echoes of the Authorised Version of the Bible being perhaps the most pervasive and conspicuous). The aim of the present study, as it has been the aim of the Edinburgh Edition, is to open up the novels to all who are willing to make the effort to become attuned to their distinctive texture, and achieve a rare degree of pleasurable comprehension. It comes with a positive invitation to this effect, recognising that, as with all major works, each reader will slot in at their own appropriate point on the scale of understanding, with their own degree of selection from the abundance of material on offer; recognising also that an excess of information (or too great a variety of interpretation), just as much as too little, is in danger of making a novel unreadable! The four chapters that follow progressively narrow the focus. Chapter 2 explores the resources available to Scott when composing his novels, notably but by no means exclusively his splendid library at Abbotsford with its remarkable collection of often rare historical books. The third chapter establishes the textural context by considering the salient points of his narrative style. Chapter 4 examines his characteristic ways of handling an abundance of literary allusions and quotations, and Chapter 5 considers the most remarkable of his intertextual devices, the chapter

Introduction  5 mottoes  or epigraphs. The sixth chapter then takes up business unfinished at the end of the second to look at the intertextual function of the literary rather than historical works at Abbotsford, and Chapter 7 draws on what has gone before to characterise briefly the distinctive texture of each of the novels in chronological sequence, introducing a degree of thematic analysis. Finally, the ‘Envoi’ ventures an overarching perspective. Readers will find that occasionally passages are discussed more than once, as the index of references to the novels demonstrates, allowing illumination from different angles in different contexts. It will also often be found that when several examples are cited to illustrate a point no two of them will have exactly the same effect, for Scott is a writer of infinite variety. A word is necessary on the use of the term ‘Author’ in this book. In a characteristically shrewd and level-headed article, ‘Scott’s Waverley: The Presence of the Author’, David Daiches argues convincingly that ‘in spite of his determined anonymity in publishing his novels, Scott in writing them found a style that really was l’homme même and must have given him away at every point to those who really knew him. … In writing Waverley Scott was using his own voice, not inventing a special authorial voice, as most novelists do’.10 William Bewick, the artist, recalled observing on his visits to Abbotsford in 1824 that Scott’s ‘conversation was delightful, very much in the Waverley style’.11 The poet Allan Cunningham asserted that ‘had his words been written down, they would have been found as correct in all things, as one of his novels’.12 And Scott’s friend James Skene recalls: While we were living in the country, Waverley appeared. It was sent to us amongst other new books from the Circulating Library in Aberdeen. We read it with much delight and with many conjectures as to the author, but from the first I was convinced from an odd circumstance that it was written by Sir Walter. All the time I was reading it I could not help fancying I heard him relating it aloud in his peculiar manner, for which I could only account by supposing that he was the author, and that the turn of expression and language insensibly led me to think of him, and recalled the sound of his voice to my recollection.13 The characteristic style of the Author of Waverley, not least in its fondness for seeing things in terms of images and its constant allusion to literary texts, is virtually indistinguishable from that frequently found in Scott’s voluminous letters. It is usual in critical studies of fiction to refer to ‘the narrator’, but that seems rather too clinical where Scott is concerned. On the other hand to speak of ‘the author’ would gloss over the many occasions when greater or lesser degrees of fictionalisation of ‘the Author of Waverley’ are involved. It has seemed appropriate, therefore,

6 Introduction to adopt Scott’s own practice and refer to ‘the Author’, and (albeit slightly awkwardly) to capitalise the adjective ‘Authorial’ to match.

Notes 1 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 2nd edn (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 110–11. I owe the reference to Paul Goetsch, ‘Scott’s The Antiquary: ­Tradition-Making as Process’, in Literatur im Kontext – Literature in Context: Festschrift für Horst W. Drescher, ed. Joachim Schwend, Susanne Hagemann, and Hermann Völkel (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 91–107 (106). Goetsch in turn acknowledges its citation in Wendell V. Harris, ‘Canonicity’, PMLA, 106 (1991), 110–21 (112). 2 See in particular for these arguments Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Julian Meldon D’Arcy, Subversive Scott: The Waverley Novels and Scottish Nationalism (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2005). 3 Fiona Robertson, ‘Walter Scott’, in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. 2, Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918), ed. Susan Manning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 183–90 (187). 4 Alison Lumsden, ‘Walter Scott’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, ed. Adrian Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 116–31 (123–24). 5 F. A. Pottle, ‘The Power of Memory in Boswell and Scott’, originally published in Essays on the Eighteeenth Century Presented to David Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), 168–89 (189), and reprinted in Jeffares, 230–53 (253). 6 Introduction to the Magnum edition of The Monastery (25b: 53.41–43). 7 ‘Samuel Richardson’, The Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 28 vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1834–36), 3.3–76 (35). Compare Martin Dodsworth: ‘The Waverley novels have a moral aspect not in laying down the moral law but in inviting consideration of what morality might entail’ (‘Scott’s Prose, Gathering Meaning, and the Art of Fiction’, Essays in Criticism, 62 (2012), 354–72 (361)). 8 For a substantial overview of contemporaneous and later criticism see James T. Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and Their Critics (London: Oxford University Press, 1936). Generous excerpts from some of the most interesting reviews can be found in Scott: The Critical Heritage, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). 9 Graham Tulloch, ‘Imagining the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Ivanhoe and Kenilworth’, in Gottlieb, 164–69 (165). 10 Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction: Critical Essays, ed. Ian Campbell (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1979), 6–17 (16, 9). 11 Life and Letters of William Bewick (Artist), ed. Thomas Landseer, 2 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1871), 2.218. 12 Alan Cunningham, ‘Some Account of the Life and Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart’., Athenæum, 258 (6 October 1832), 641–53 (641). 13 James Skene, Memories of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Basil Thomson (London: John Murray, 1909), 228–29.

2 Resources

1 In 1811 the Edinburgh lawyer Walter Scott, author of an immensely popular and profitable series of narrative poems set in the middle ages, bought a farmhouse on the south bank of the Tweed near Melrose in the Border region. It was known as Cartleyhole, or Clarty (Muddy) Hole, but he renamed it Abbotsford to match the ruined Melrose Abbey. Three years later he published his first novel, Waverley, and after another three years he started to build a large new house for himself in what has come to be known as the Scottish baronial style. He had many visitors, sometimes too many for comfort. They would be greeted by their host at an impressive porch, modelled on Linlithgow Palace, and ushered into an entrance hall replete with armour and other knick-knacks of historical significance, or conjectured significance. When the new building was complete in 1825 Scott himself had direct entrance to the hall from his study lined with books on two levels, through a pair of doors separated by a lobby. There was a private spiral staircase leading from the gallery in the study to his first-floor sleeping quarters. On the ground floor another pair of doors gave him access to a large library with extensive bookcases (the outer door and some of the bookcases can be seen in the frontispiece). It was in this secluded study with library adjoining that he wrote for preference during the last years of his life. The Waverley Novels invariably wax eloquent whenever book-hoards are mentioned. At the outset of the series Edward Waverley finds in the library at Waverley Hall an ‘ample realm’, through which he ‘was permitted to roam at large’, albeit without discipline, ending up ‘knowing much that is known but to few’ but lacking ‘the skill to command and to arrange’ it (1: 14.19, 15.30–31, 16.31–32). In the second novel, Guy Mannering, when Godfrey Bertram sets about magisterial reform on assuming office as a justice of the peace, the Author is prompted to inform the reader that in like manner ‘upon the arrival of a new housemaid, the ancient, hereditary, and domestic spiders, who have spun their webs over the lower division of my book-shelves, (consisting chiefly of law and divinity,) during the peaceful reign of her predecessor, fly at full speed

8 Resources before the unexpected inroads of the new mercenary’. The image is followed up by a reference to Duke Humphrey from 2 Henry VI, no doubt prompted by that nobleman’s celebrated library at Oxford (2: 33.1–14). Later in the same narrative Dominie Sampson is almost out of his mind with rapture when ‘the late bishop’s venerable library’ arrives at Woodbourne for him to catalogue in ‘his best running hand, forming each letter with the accuracy of a lover writing a valentine, and plac[ing] each individually on the destined shelf with all the reverence which I have seen a lady pay to a jar of old china’. Three eloquent couplets by Crabbe are invoked for the ‘antique and venerable attributes’ of these volumes which Sampson later lovingly repairs after they come under fire during the attack on Woodbourne (109.27–110.2, 166.9–17); and at the end of the novel one of the largest rooms in the planned tastefully Gothic rebuilding of the New Place of Ellangowan is labelled ‘The Library’, with ‘Mr Sampson’s Apartment’ adjoining (353.20–28). In Rob Roy there is an eloquent description of a neglected country house library (of unusual importance as the narrative develops), with ‘antique oaken shelves bent beneath the weight of the ponderous folios so dear to the seventeenth century’: An air of dilapidation, as obvious as it was uncomfortable, pervaded the large apartment, and announced the neglect from which the knowledge which its walls contained had not been able to exempt it. The tattered tapestry, the worm-eaten shelves, the huge and clumsy, yet tottering, tables, desks, and chairs, the rusty grate, seldom gladdened by either sea-coal or faggots, intimated the contempt of the lords of Osbaldistone Hall for learning, and the volumes which record its treasures. (5: 81.29–82.10) Further on in the series, in Kenilworth, we encounter a former monastic library despoiled and looted at the Reformation where ‘the very presses themselves seemed to have incurred the displeasure of those enemies of learning, who had destroyed the volumes with which they had been heretofore filled’ (11: 27.39–28.1). In the Introduction to Quentin Durward yet another damaged book-hoard appears, a ‘curious old Gothic library’ enlarged by the Marquis of Hautlieu’s grandfather and father and containing ‘curiously and richly painted missals, manuscripts of 1380, 1320, and even earlier, and works in Gothic type, printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ (15: 20.33, 21.10–12). That collection had been seriously depleted during the French Revolution, the damage minimised by the Curé buying back books from locals into whose hands they had fallen.1 A similar sense of outrage is elicited in Woodstock when the Independent Tomkins prefaces his memorable attack on a sort of Reduced Shakespeare by thumping a copy of his works, eliciting semi-comic Authorial outrage: ‘and oh! revered of the Roxburghe, it was the first

Resources  9 folio – beloved of the Bannatyne, it was Hemmings and Condel – it was the editio princeps’ (19: 43.6–8). Later in the novel ancient books are subjected to far worse treatment, though on this occasion the volumes in question are much more obscure and their violation is more entirely the occasion for an Authorial witticism: Alice finds Doctor Rochecliffe ‘in what was called the study, once filled with ancient books, which, long since converted into cartridges, had made more noise in the world at their final exit, than during the space which had intervened betwixt that and their first publication’ (296.43–297.4). Unlike some of the libraries in the novels, the Abbotsford library has happily survived unscathed. It is an unparalleled example of a major author’s collection, still arranged exactly as it was in his lifetime, and quite apart from its value to students of Scott it is an important repository of rare, in some cases unique, volumes. 2 As he notes in propria persona in the Introduction to Chronicles of the Canongate Scott was an obsessive collector of ‘old and odd books’ (20: 5.35), and not many significant historical or literary works published before 1832 (in English at least) are absent from his shelves. Lindsay Levy, who has produced an online catalogue of the library for the Advocates Library, a Faculty of Advocates Trust being the owners, observes: Sir Walter Scott built himself a house dominated by its library. Although he seems to have persuaded himself to the contrary, he continued to buy books even when his financial situation was so dire that he was effectively working himself to death to repay his debts. He accumulated books from authors and publishers around the world, and occasionally forgot to return those that had been lent to him.3 Perhaps there was a forgetfulness in the opposite direction too. When the fictitious Captain Clutterbuck in The Monastery sets up as an expert on the monastic ruins at Kennaquhair, the historical Melrose, he borrows a copy of William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum ‘from the library at A——’, presumably for general information about monastic practices which might shed light on the Scottish foundation (9: 8.13–14). Dugdale’s work does not appear either in the catalogue prepared for the Bannatyne Club by George Huntly Gordon and published under the initials of J. G. Cochrane in 1838, or in the modern online catalogue. It is conceivable that Scott is sending a coded (and evidently unsuccessful) message to an actual defaulting borrower! Towards the end of his life he began a semi-fictitious guide to Abbotsford, with descriptions of some of its remarkable antiquities. The final pages of the fragmentary Reliquiæ Trotcosienses or The Gabions of the Late Jonathan Oldbuck Esq. of Monkbarns consist of comments on a selection of the books he found most remarkable in his collection, highlighting especially popular

10 Resources songs and ballads, works on the supernatural, and editions of French romances.4 The title of this guide alludes to the eponymous bibliographer in The Antiquary, who scrupulously examines a newly acquired folio volume soon after we first meet him (3: 9.35–10.2). The bookshelves in his mansion on the former Abbey Lands of Trotcosey are double-stacked with treasures ‘while numberless others littered the floor and the tables’, the result of unremitting hunting down of rare items at bargain prices. He can recall a quotation with the page number, and even its location on the page.5 The Reliquiæ, with its references to Jonathan Oldbuck, is a celebration of the results of Scott’s own life-long urge to collect, just as much as to create, books. His Abbotsford library looks magnificent, with its ranks of finely-bound volumes, as the frontispiece shows, but it was far from an inert vanity project: in a striking observation R. P. Gillies recalls how, ‘if you had in view any literary pursuit requiring investigation, and were consulting a book in the library, he would immediately weave together a mass of evidence, remind you of every author whose works deserved attention, and throw more light on the subject in ten minutes, than, if left alone among books, you could have obtained for yourself in as many months’.6 Lindsay Levy’s online catalogue is invaluable, but the 1838 Bannatyne Club volume still has its uses. In particular, it gives an immediate sense of the scale and scope of the collection. Although it does not cover everything that recent research has unearthed, its listing of the contents extends to almost 350 quarto pages. It begins with twenty-three pages of works on Scottish history, and the other specialist sections include fourteen pages enumerating pamphlets associated with the Jacobite uprisings and twice as many with items on ‘witchcraft, demonology, apparitions, astrology, and the occult sciences’. Literary works in English, in every genre, are comprehensively covered, and there is an extensive representation of foreign literature. Scott revelled in rare and obscure publications. Most of his original readers will have enjoyed the strange names of authors and titles of volumes mentioned in the Waverley Novels, while fellow-bibliophiles or bibliomaniacs will have ticked off the details in their own mental lists of books acquired or desired. The early decades of the nineteenth century were a period of ‘intense bookishness’ among the literate classes.7 Much of the Abbotsford library was assembled between the first appearance of Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s The Bibliomania; or, Book-Madness in 1809 and his Bibliophobia. Remarks on the Present Languid and Depressed State of Literature and the Book Trade which appeared in 1832, the year of Scott’s death. ‘A temporary insanity or frenzy … took hold early in the nineteenth century, came to a head at the Roxburghe Sale of 1812, and was finished a decade or so later’.8 Many of Scott’s readers will have had a particular interest in the bookishness of his fiction. When the Baron of Bradwardine in Waverley refers to an account of

Resources  11 prodigies in ‘the little work compiled by Julius Obsequens, and inscribed by the learned Scheffer, the editor, to his patron, Benedictus Skytte, Baron of Dudershoff’ he is giving an accurate description (apart from ‘Dudershoff’ for ‘Duderhoff’) of a work published in 1679 and to be found on Scott’s shelves (1: 65.18–21). Two pages later the same character’s reference to the ‘fierce, churlish, and morose’ disposition of the bear in ‘Archibald Simson pastor of Dalkeith’s Hierogliphica Animalium’ is again a precise reference to an Abbotsford volume (67.33–35): Simson’s entry on the bear begins on page 53 by citing Ovid’s ‘stolidæque ferocia mentis’ (ferocious, and of a stolid disposition). In Kenilworth Janet Forster buys two classes of books from Wayland Smith, in his guise as pedlar. There is a collection of puritanical pamphlets with plausible but probably mostly fictitious titles (the exception, Foxes and Firebrands, is at Abbotsford), and there are four named secular works all genuine and in period, though none of them are found in Scott’s library, at least as rare editions. The Author refers to the pedlar’s stock as ‘such rare volumes as would now make the fortune of twenty retail booksellers’ (11: 218.32–33). The physical presence of volumes is powerfully felt in the novels. Peter Garside notes ‘an awareness of the materiality of books, and a concern not just for individual titles but actual copies of those works’.9 In Waverley the hero retrieves his damaged Ariosto from the ruined Tully-Veolan ‘as a treasure, though wasted by the wind and rain’ (1: 317.4–6). This is paralleled in Guy Mannering by the volume of Shakespeare carried by Harry Bertram ‘in one pocket, a small bundle with a change of linen in the other, an oaken cudgel in his hand’ (2: 117.27–28). At the beginning of Redgauntlet Alan Fairford writes that he has one of the two volumes of a legal folio, Johannes Voet’s Commentarius ad Pandectas, ‘spread open before me, yet … I only use him as a reading-desk on which to scribble this sheet of nonsense’ (17: 10.37–38). Later in the narrative he has better cause to do more serious violence to a very different publication. Seeking his ‘little Sallust’ for comfort in his sickness while crossing the Solway Firth, he pulls out of his pocket not the Latin historian but the supposed hymn-book with which he had been presented a few hours since, by that temperate and scrupulous person, Mr Thomas Trumbull, alias Turnpenny. The volume was bound in sable, and its exterior might have become a psalter. But what was Alan’s astonishment to read on the title-page the following words: – “Merry Thoughts for Merry Men; or, Mother Midnight’s Miscellany for the small Hours”. (248.26–32) After a hasty perusal Alan flings the offending volume into the sea. Scott’s appreciation of the materiality of books will have evoked a pleasurable response in many of his original readers. Ina Ferris has observed

12 Resources that ‘Romantic bookishness moves into the foreground the tactile dimension of books: books as objects that have been or are to be handled’.10 Nowhere is Scott’s appreciation and love of books as objects more evident than in his quotation in the Prefatory Letter to Peveril of the Peak and again in the Introduction to its successor Quentin Durward of a line from John Ferriar’s poem The Bibliomania: ‘The small, rare volume, black with tarnish’d gold’ (14: 7.39–40; 15: 21.9 (with ‘dark’ for ‘black’ in both cases)). Some readers may have recalled that the line appears on the fourth page of Dibdin’s work with the same title and date of publication.

2 No wonder that when Scott was away from his library he felt deprived. He notes that Anne of Geierstein ‘was written at a time when circumstances did not place within my reach the stores of a library tolerably rich in historical works, and especially the memoirs of the middle ages, amidst which I had been accustomed to pursue the composition of my fictitious narratives’ (25b: 557.2–6). His duties as one of the two clerks at the Court of Session required him to be in Edinburgh during term time. Following the collapse of his financial affairs in 1826 he had been forced to sell his town house and take lodgings, and it was there that he was composing Anne under pressure in the autumn and winter of 1828–29. This is not to suggest that Scott was at all library-bound. When he was at Abbotsford he usually rose early, and until the financial crash he had done most of his writing before the household assembled for breakfast. Much of the rest of the day would be spent in conversation with family, estate workers, and visitors. In the course of his career he received over 6500 letters from a wide variety of correspondents, many replete with information, and he replied to most of them, often at considerable length. His butler William Dalgleish recalled: ‘I heard Sir Walter say that he began to correspond with his friends by letters when he was about fifteen years of age. “And all the letters which I have wrote from that time up to this date, which is eighteen hundred and twenty-five, if anyone would repeat the first line of each letter, I could repeat them from end to end”’.11 No longer anonymous after the financial crash of 1826, he highlighted his debt to two of his correspondents in the Introduction to Chronicles of the Canongate: his regular informant ‘Mr Joseph Train, supervisor of excise at Dumfries’, and the lady who told him about the original of Jeanie Deans (20: 4.34–5.34). During the legal terms he would spend the working day in court, and he participated fully in the social and political goings-on in Edinburgh. In the preliminary matter to The Monastery the Author of Waverley says ‘I have buried myself in libraries, to extract from the nonsense of ancient days new nonsense of mine own’, but he

Resources  13 goes on to tell how he emerges from ‘this learned sepulchre’ to pursue his researches in public, ‘making my way from the highest society to the lowest’ (9: 27.41–28.19). One may compare the Author’s observation in The Fortunes of Nigel: We can assure the reader – and perhaps if we have ever been able to afford him amusement, it is owing in a great degree to this cause – that we never found ourselves in company with the stupidest of all possible companions in a post-chaise, or with the most errant cumber-corner that ever occupied a place in the mail-coach, without finding, that in the course of our conversation with him, we had some ideas suggested to us, either grave or gay, or some information communicated in the course of our journey. (13: 292.41–293.6) Scott did not forget such encounters. He told Sir John Bowring in April 1830 that ‘he had forgotten nothing that had occurred to him since he was three years old’.12 In Rob Roy one of Baillie Jarvie’s pithy expressions derives from a Border ploughman whom Scott met in Shetland (5: 538 (note to 209.31–32)). James Skene recognised that he himself had unwittingly been the source of Hattaraick’s German drinking song in Guy Mannering (2: 188.12–16): Something in the course of one of our rides had suggested to me the words of a German drinking-song, which I repeated to him; it took his fancy, and he made me repeat it to him two or three times over, which led me to expect a translation, and accordingly my song very soon made its appearance, not in translation, but in ipsissimis verbis, as Dirk Hatteraick’s song in Guy Mannering, in one line of which, however, there was a small mistake.13 A conversation with a Border farmer proved fruitful for the utterances of the farmer and his shepherd at the beginning of The Black Dwarf (4a: 11.7–14.12, 130): as Robert Shortreed recalls, much of what the farmer said ‘is there not only in substance merely but … we have the actual words and phrases he made use of’. More generally, Shortreed observes that ‘he never almost passed a single Country body without speaking to them, and he often had long cracks wi’ them, and that’s the way (for he does the same thing yet) he gets sae mony o’ the phrases and queer words that ye see in his buiks – for mony is the odd thing, as ye ken, ane hears the Common fouk say’.14 Scott’s voice can be heard in the statement by Edward Christian (alias Ganlesse) in Peveril of the Peak: ‘All knowledge is gained by communication, either with the dead, through books, or, more pleasingly, through the conversation of the living’ (14: 218.33–35). There is also probably something of himself in Minna Troil in The Pirate, who, isolated in Shetland, without the benefit of books and ‘the

14 Resources lessons bequeathed [as Wordsworth puts it] By dead men to their kind’ had before her ‘the book of nature …, that noblest of volumes, where we are ever called to wonder and to admire, even when we cannot understand’ (12: 22.17–24). The Pirate is a reminder of one additional extra-library resource that should not be overlooked. Scott was widely travelled in Great Britain, and each of his novels has a distinguishing geographical setting. As Sir Herbert Grierson observes, ‘The changes of scene themselves and the care that Scott took to individualise the background was itself a new and arresting feature’.15 Perhaps this is at its most obvious in The Pirate, drawing as it does on his voyage to the Northern Isles in 1814. True, Scott treats his settings imaginatively, so that there is debate about the exact location of Fairport in The Antiquary, or of Wolfscrag in The Bride of Lammermoor, for example. But many of the fictional journeys can be followed on the map (just as the temporal settings can often be linked with calendar dates), and the novels’ topographical locations contribute significantly to their timbres. The north-east of Scotland in The Antiquary, and the Berwickshire setting of The Bride, are as important as (for example) the Solway Firth in Guy Mannering and Redgauntlet, or Edinburgh in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, or London in The Fortunes of Nigel, or Douglas Dale in Castle Dangerous. As with the narrative poems, readers will draw on their own memories or impressions of the locations and feed them into Scott’s imaginative recreations.16 The variety of Scott’s researches in his library and in the outside world is summed up by two of the original reviewers with more eloquence than would be deemed appropriate in a modern critic: At one time he was found huddled into a corner, poring over musty and forgotten books; at another, he was hunting after antiquated garments, old-fashioned suits of armour, and exploded weapons of war; and, at a third, he was found sitting all alone, eyeing the mountain eagle in its flight, or the ocean wave in its foam. Now he was mingling with all the strange and eccentric characters which the town afforded; – anon, he was with the hoary-headed shepherd upon the cliffs, the wrinkled sexton in the churchyard, or smoking his pipe in the hut of the aged widow, whom both time and kinsfolk had forgotten, while she, to the booming of her wheel, repeated the songs and the legends of other times. Such were the sources whence the Scottish Novelist drew the materials of his future works.17 No great and lasting writer ever obtained his fame without borrowing largely and wisely; and we know of no living genius who has written so much and borrowed so little, and borrowed with such good sense and discernment. The old romances, the old histories,

Resources  15 the old chronicles, the old legends, and the old ballads, have presented him with incidents, with characters, with many allusions, and numerous illustrations. … All those who wish to stamp upon their works the fixed and permanent image of their nation, must condescend, like the author before us, to become acquainted with life past and present; – to go from hall to bower – from the baron’s castle to the shepherd’s shiel – must converse with the peasant at his hearth as well as with the noble; learn the concerns of many-­coloured life; and hearken from rude, as well as from learned lips, the legends, and stories, and scraps of ancient songs, which still linger among a curious and original people.18

3 A recurrent image in the novels depicts the Author as mining for treasure, or harvesting, always in need of new material to work on. At the end of the third series of Tales of my Landlord he proposes to retire from fictitious composition since the reader ‘cannot be more sensible than I am, that sufficient varieties have now been exhibited of the Scottish character, to exhaust one individual’s powers of observation … . I retire from the field, conscious there remains behind not only a large harvest, but labourers capable of gathering it in’ (7b: 183.9–19). The young advocate at the beginning of The Heart of Mid-Lothian says that if novelists depend on their own resources, they ‘can hardly hit upon characters or incidents which have not been used again and again’, and ‘the end of uncertainty … is the death of interest’: he recommends as a source of new material ‘the State-trials, or … the Books of Adjournal, where every now and then you read new pages of the human heart, and turns of fortune far beyond what the boldest novelist ever attempted to produce from the coinage of his brain’ (6: 14.42–15.45). In the Dedicatory Epistle to Ivanhoe Laurence Templeton recalls that when Dr Dryasdust and he discussed the reason for the popularity of the early Waverley Novels it seemed to be the opinion of the York antiquary that the charm lay entirely in the art with which the unknown author had availed himself, like a second M‘Pherson, of the stores of antiquity which lay scattered around him, supplying his own indolence or poverty of invention, by the incidents which had actually taken place in his country at no distant period, introducing real characters, and scarcely suppressing real names. … It was no wonder … that, having begun to work a mine so plentiful, he should have derived from his works fully more credit and profit than the facility of his labours merited. (8: 5.35–6.17)

16 Resources This imagined denigratory view of his fiction is introduced at the point where Scott turns for the first time to medieval England as a source of new material, so as to ‘display his talent by a fresh discovery of untasted fountains’ (25b: 11.19), and in the Introductory Epistle to the next novel, The Monastery, Captain Clutterbuck offers the Benedictine’s manuscript to the Author of Waverley with the remark ‘Forgive my hinting to you, that the deepest well may be exhausted, – the best corps of grenadiers, as our old general of brigade expressed himself, may be used up’ (9: 23.13–15). Clutterbuck and Dryasdust express similar sentiments in the Introductory Epistle to The Fortunes of Nigel (‘The world say you will run yourself out’ (13: 15.26–27)) and the Prefatory Letter to Peveril of the Peak (‘Not to mention, my worthy sir, that perhaps you may think the subject exhausted’ (14: 12.3–4)). When Scott moved to the largely unfamiliar region of the Northern Isles for The Pirate he wrote to his friend William Erskine, Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland, inviting him to Abbotsford with the request ‘I want to talk to you about the locale of Zetland, for I am making my bricks with a very limited allowance of straw’ (12: 395–96). The early reviewers were divided between those who thought the Author of Waverley was in danger of running out of new materials and those who found him inexhaustible.19 Ultimately, though, Scott himself was confident in the plenitude of the varied resources available to him. In 1819 he wrote to John Ballantyne: ‘I am not afraid of working myself out – not that I should not soon do so were I to depend on my own limited invention but the range of the past and the present is at my disposal & that is inexhaustible’. 20 Eight years later, in the Introduction to Chronicles of the Canongate he reiterated, with a realistic qualification, that, along with information received from correspondents, ‘old and odd books, and a considerable collection of family legends, formed another quarry, so ample, that it was much more likely that the strength of the labourer should be exhausted, than that materials should fail’ (20: 5.35–38).

4 Fresh grist was always arriving at Scott’s mill from a variety of sources. Nevertheless much of the basic texture of the Waverley Novels, and the unique reading experience each of them offers, is determined above all by the library. We have noted that the individual ‘feel’ of each novel is determined partly by its topographical setting, but it also depends to a considerable extent on its historical source texts. Scott’s use of the historical sources for each novel is analysed by the eewn editor or editors, often in considerable detail, in the Historical Note and sometimes the ‘Genesis’ section of the Essay on the Text. With one exception, no two novels depend primarily on the same sources, and

Resources  17 no two use their sources in exactly the same way. 21 There are certain historical texts that Scott reverts to on several occasions for purposes which most of their titles sufficiently indicate. He is able to draw without effort on, for example: Edmund Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland; Joseph Strutt’s three antiquarian works on English dress and customs; David Hume of Godscroft’s History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus; Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and Provincial Glossary; Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft; George Turbervile’s anonymous Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting; his own edition of the Somers’ Tracts (historical pamphlets mainly of the seventeenth century); the Covenanting biographies by Patrick Walker now usually known as Six Saints of the Covenant; Robert Wodrow’s History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland; Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland; Robert Henry’s History of Great Britain; and David Hume’s History of England. A handful of other historical texts have a prominent role in more than one novel: Pennant’s Tour in Scotland in Waverley and The Abbot; Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Mills’s History of the Crusades in The Talisman and Count Robert of Paris; and Comines’s Mémoires with Petitot’s linking commentary, together with Mézeray’s Histoire de France, in Quentin Durward and Anne of Geierstein. For Waverley Scott had access to a wealth of written and oral accounts of the 1745 Uprising. None of the subsequent novels quite matches the plenitude of its combined resources of library and oral tradition, but The Tale of Old Mortality and Peveril of the Peak are deeply informed by Scott’s unsurpassed collections of seventeenth-century Scottish and English pamphlets, and Waverley’s blending of oral and printed sources is powerfully employed on a more limited tragic canvas in The Bride of Lammermoor. At the opposite extreme, there are several novels with a thin historical texture where Scott did not have access to archival materials (for various reasons), or where such materials were not called for: The Black Dwarf, a staccato, ballad-inspired narrative; The Betrothed with its location in the Welsh marches; Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous; and those set in or shortly before Scott’s lifetime, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, and Saint Ronan’s Well. In several novels one recherché historical text has a particular impact on the texture. Many of the military details and expressions in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose come from Robert Monro’s vivid Expedition (the title is much longer) recounting his varied service during the Thirty Years’ War, though as James Anderson has noted ‘they are incorporated in the novel so naturally and flexibly that no-one would ever suspect it’. 22 Comparably significant roles are played in Woodstock by several printed accounts of the strange goings-on at the manor, and (less pervasively) in Ivanhoe by the Templar Rule and in The Fair Maid of Perth by Henry Adamson’s long poem The Muses Threnodie with James Cant’s ‘commentary and

18 Resources notes on the poem … so detailed that his edition became known as “The History of Perth”’ (21: 466). In two novels with more than one distinct centre of historical interest, each part has a dominant source. Kenilworth uses Elias Ashmole’s Antiquities of Berkshire for the scenes set in and near Cumnor, and John Nicols’s compilation The Progress and Public Processions … of Queen Elizabeth for the action at Kenilworth. And though in Anne of Geierstein the Comines Mémoires are central, as they had been in Quentin Durward, much is added to them, giving a very different feel to each section of the work: the geological component of the opening Alpine description, taken from Louis Simond’s Switzerland; the detailed and atmospheric Secret Tribunal drawing on five printed authorities; the Provençal scenes indebted to J. R. Pappon’s Histoire générale de Provence and more specifically the Mont Saint Victoire setting inspired by James Skene’s sketches; and the events at La Ferette and the concluding battles tapping into the recently published thirteen-­ volume Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne by Barante. Scott frequently takes a vivid one-off detail from an otherwise unfamiliar historical source in his collection. When in The Heart of Mid-­ Lothian Argyle says to Jeanie ‘Alas! … I could almost say with old Ormond, that there could not be any, whose influence was smaller with kings and ministers’ (6: 321.5–7) he is, as Tony Inglis observes, echoing a phrase recorded by Thomas Carte in his History of the Life of James, Duke of Ormonde.23 Towards the end of Peveril of the Peak Scott draws on a footnote in James Granger’s Biographical History of England for the Duke of Buckingham’s reference to Mother Cresswell: ‘malice itself could not deny that she was born well, married well, lived well, and died well; since she was born in Shadwell, married Cresswell, lived in Camberwell, and died in Bridewell’ (14: 443.37–39). A few pages later when Buckingham is on his way to a showdown with the King he is apprised of the desperate state of his treasonable conspiracy by a man who approaches his coach and sings in a deep manly voice, the burthen of an old French song on the battle of Marignan, in which is imitated the German-French of the defeated Swiss. “Tout est verlore La tintelore, Tout est verlore Bei Got.” (468.37–469.6) Scott recollected the lines from an equally memorable footnote in another of the works at Abbotsford, œuvres de Maitre François Rabelais. In Quentin Durward he draws on Richard Verstegan’s Restitution Of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities for a couplet quoted there and applied by Lord Crawford to Le Balafré (15: 398.28–29). The Grand Master’s baculus, or staff, in The Talisman is taken from an article in German

Resources  19 by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in an Austrian periodical Fundgruben des Orients (18b: 403 (note to 90.35–37)). A longer passage derived from a one-off out-of-the-way source is found in The Antiquary: the folk tale on which ‘The Fortunes of Martin Waldeck’ (3: 137.33–146.17) is based appears in a collection Die Sagen und Volksmärchen der Deutschen by Friedrich Gottschalck published in 1814 (25a: 434 (note to 150.8–11)).24 Few will doubt that the Waverley Novels were the product of an exceptionally well-stocked mind, bookish but by no means book-bound. The next two chapters will explore the distinctive style and narrative strategies devised by that mind to deploy its plenitude in the service of fictional entertainment.

Notes 1 Compare the Authorial assertion that the (fictitious) records of the story recounted in Anne of Geierstein were lost when ‘the superb library of the Monastery of Saint Gall’ was destroyed by the French revolutionary armies (22: 3.13–16). 2 For example, the library has what is now thought to be probably the sole survivor of an 1810 pamphlet version of Robert Burns’s The Fornicators Court, republished in 2009 as a facsimile edition by the Abbotsford Library Project Trust. See Lindsay Levy, ‘“Long life to thy fame and peace to thy soul”: Walter Scott’s Collection of Robert Burns’s Books and Manuscripts’, Scottish Archives, 16 (2010), 32–40 (34). 3 Lindsay Levy, ‘Was Sir Walter Scott a Bibliomaniac?’, in From Compositors to Collectors: Essays on Book-Trade History, ed. John Hinks and Matthew Day (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2012), 309–21 (320). Levy notes (312–13) that it is unfortunately impossible to determine the date of accession for most of the Abbotsford volumes. The catalogue can be accessed at . 4 Reliquiæ Trotcosienses or The Gabions of the Late Jonathan Oldbuck Esq. of Monkbarns, ed. Gerard Carruthers and Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 45–71. 5 See 3: 21.29–35, 23.22–26.5, 71.29–35. The passage referred to in the last of these, from the 1721 edition of Aubrey’s Miscellanies, is actually in the top quarter of the page, rather than ‘near the middle’, but it is unlikely that any reader will be aware of this. 6 [R. P. Gillies], Recollections of Sir Walter Scott, Bart (London: James Fraser, 1837), 275. 7 Ina Ferris, ‘Scott’s Authorship and Book Culture’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott, ed. Fiona Robertson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 9–21 (12). 8 H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 208. Bibliophobia includes as unusual evidence of the falling off of interest in matters bibliographic the low prices fetched at the auction of the manuscripts of thirteen of the Waverley Novels. Dibdin says that the Advocates Library had made an offer of £1000 and declined a request to double it, so that the proceeds of little more than £300 at the auction must have been a considerable disappointment: Bibliophobia, 10–11n, 12n. 9 Peter Garside, ‘The Baron’s Books: Scott’s Waverley as a Bibliomaniacal Romance’, Romanticism, 14 (2008), 245–58 (246).

20 Resources 10 Ina Ferris, ‘Book-Love and the Remaking of Literary Culture in the Romantic Periodical’, in Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900, ed. Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 111–25 (115). 11 ‘Memoirs of William Dalgleish, Butler to Sir Walter Scott. (Discovered and Edited by G. E. Mitton)’, Part 3, Cornhill Magazine, n. s. 71 (July 1931), 213–31 (230–31). 12 Autobiographical Recollections of Sir John Bowring (London: Henry S. King, 1877), 10. 13 James Skene, Memories of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Basil Thomson (London: John Murray, 1909), 52. The novel has ‘Ich ben’ for ‘Ich bin’. 14 W. E. Wilson, ‘The Making of the “Minstrelsy.” Scott and Shortreed in Liddesdale’, Cornhill Magazine, n. s. 73 (1932), 266–83 (272, 280). 15 Sir Herbert Grierson, Sir Walter Scott, Bart.: A New Life Supplementary to, and Corrective of, Lockhart’s Biography (London: Constable, 1938), 202. 16 For a discussion of the topography of the poems see J. H. Alexander, ‘To Visit or Not to Visit? The Yarrow Question in the “Lay” and “Marmion”’, in Influence, 31–40. 17 Anonymous review of Redgauntlet in the European Review, 1 (July 1824), 275–90 (277). 18 Anonymous review of Quentin Durward in Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, 1 (June 1823), 200–14 (201–02). 19 For example, in its review of Ivanhoe, the New Monthly Magazine saw signs that the field was ‘becoming somewhat sterile under so quick a succession of heavy crops’ (13 (January 1820), 73–82 (82)), whereas, reviewing Quentin Durward, the Museum; or Record of Literature, Fine Arts, Science, Antiquities, the Drama, &c. noted ‘the abundance and celerity with which the Scottish novelist pours forth his excellent productions … without the smallest symptom yet, we rejoice to observe, of exhaustion or decay’: Nos 54–57 (3–24 May 1823), 273–80, 289, 309–11, 327–29 (273). There was also a division between those who found the characters repetitive and others who were able to discriminate between them. For example, reviewing Quentin Durward, the European Magazine compared Scott unfavourably with Fielding and Shakespeare in this respect (83 (June 1823), 544–49 (546)), whereas the Quarterly Review, treating The Pirate, noted: ‘Minna and Brenda are the sisters of Flora Mac-Ivor and Rose Bradwardine … . We do not recollect a stronger instance of our author’s talents, of the clearness with which his characters are conceived, and the consistency with which they are developed, than the points of resemblance and dissimilarity in these four exquisite portraits. In ordinary hands they would have been exact imitations of each other, or totally unlike’ (26 (January 1822), 454–74 (471–72)). 20 Letters, 5.445: 2 August [1819]. 21 The exception involves Quentin Durward and Anne of Geierstein, which both draw extensively on Comines’ Mémoires. 22 James Anderson, Sir Walter Scott and History (Edinburgh: Edina Press, 1981), 68. 23 Sir Walter Scott, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, ed. Tony Inglis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 646 (note 18). 24 James Anderson observes many curious one-off borrowings in Sir Walter Scott and History (Edinburgh: Edina Press, 1981): see e.g. 63–65.

3 Style

1 The reason most commonly given by those who have attempted to read a novel in the Waverley series and retired defeated, is that they find Scott’s style long-winded and unwieldy. They react against what Ian Duncan calls ‘a prolix, elaborately literary narrative’ in a ‘dryasdust, ironical and pedantic style’ that ‘declines to settle into a storytelling “voice”’.1 Or as John Lauber, who has read the novels with remarkably little pleasure, puts it, the ‘debased Johnsonese … is objectionable not simply because it is undistinguished, but because it impedes the movement of the story, blurs and generalizes the scenes and actions described, sometimes contradicts the intended effect, and makes impossible the expression of genuine feeling’.2 Even one of Scott’s most enthusiastic twentieth-century readers, C. S. Lewis, would sympathise. Already at the age of fifteen Lewis set against Scott’s ‘lively narrative & carefully-welded plots’ his ‘lengthiness and verbosity’, 3 and several months later he returned to the contrast: ‘But what a pity it is to see such good “yarning” as Scott’s spoilt and tripped up at every turn by his intolerably stilted and pedantic English. I suppose we must thank Dr. Johnson and “Glorious John” [Dryden] for first making such prose possible’.4 Lewis’s view had not changed when he came to deliver the presidential address to the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club in 1956: ‘what is unfortunately constant is the polysyllabic, uneconomical, even florid, texture of his narrative and descriptive writing. … Stylistically, … Scott lived in an unfortunate period, and his real strength was allowed to come out only in dialogue’.5 It must be admitted that Scott’s style is sometimes slack, as the earliest critics never tired of pointing out. Among them the British Magazine, reviewing Peveril of the Peak, found in the later novels ‘a want of care, an utter slovenliness and depravation of style, which impair the works so much as to bring them on a par with the productions of ordinary novelists’.6 One need progress no further into Quentin Durward than the opening sentence of the first chapter of the narrative to find a typical example: The latter part of the fifteenth century prepared a train of future events, which ended by raising France to that state of formidable

22 Style power, which has ever since been, from time to time, the principal object of jealousy to the other European nations. (15: 23.9–12) Scott actually changed the clumsy repeated ‘which’ to ‘that’ in proof, but he then cancelled the alteration with a ‘stet’, realising there was already a ‘that’ in the sentence, and another at the beginning of the sentence following (‘Before that period …’). The change was made anyway and the first edition has ‘that’ (the eewn text reinstates the ‘which’). Of course, Scott really ought to have recast the sentence. That he failed to do so, especially with the first sentence of the first chapter, shows that he could be careless, casual, or indeed lazy, at least on occasion. (Many other ugly repetitions in the novels were more satisfactorily eliminated at proof stage by his intermediaries, but by no means all. Some of those that remained were sorted for the Magnum edition.) Particularly in his later works, Scott is in danger of letting multiple subordinate clauses run away with a sentence, as here in The Betrothed: Among these [enemies of the Saxon and Norman race] was reckoned Guenwyn, (or more properly Guenwynwen, though we retain the briefer appellative,) who continued to exercise a precarious sovereignty over such parts of Powis-land as had not been subjugated by the Mortimers, Guarines, Latimers, Fitz-Alans, and other Norman nobles, who, under various pretexts, and sometimes contemning all others than the open avowal of superior force, had severed and appropriated large portions of that once extensive and independent principality, which, when Wales was unhappily divided into three parts on the death of Roderick Mawr, fell to the lot of his youngest son Mervyn. (18a: 14.13–22) Confronted with such a syntactic maze readers may well react as Roger Wildrake does to Cromwell’s speeches in Woodstock: ‘[he] had got so much confused among the various clauses of the harangue, that his brain was bewildered, like that of a country clown when he chances to get himself involved among a crowd of carriages, and cannot stir a step to get out of the way of one of them, without being in danger of being ridden over by the others’ (19: 85.36–41). One should beware, though, of unthinking concession to the stylistic detractors. When looked at with some care, particular adverse comments can lead to much more positive evaluations. C. S. Lewis’s Edinburgh address provides a case in point. He has argued that Scott’s style is frequently faulty, but he offers only one actual example, taken from Guy Mannering (2: 18.26–28): ‘Nothing could easily be worse than the sentence in which Mannering looks up and the planets “rolled” above him, “each in its orbit of liquid light”’.7 Lewis had originally made this point in a letter of 1945 to his former student Harry Blamires (in response to

Style  23 the manuscript of a book called ‘Scott and his Predecessors’, which was unfortunately never published). He advised Blamires that he ‘shd. somewhere acknowledge the abominations of Scott’s style at his worst, (See G. Mannering cap 3 ‘Above rolled the planets, each by its own liquid orbit of light distinguished etc.)’.8 There (unlike at Edinburgh) he quotes accurately; and he makes it clear that his objection is to the two words ‘rolled’ and ‘orbit’. It is difficult to see why ‘rolled’ should be thought inappropriate, any more than the sun rising and setting for example. The objection to ‘orbit’ is presumably based on the sense most common in modern times. But if one looks up the Oxford English Dictionary one finds the Guy Mannering occurrence cited under sense 2b, ‘a celestial sphere’, with examples from Defoe and (albeit later than Scott) Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Dialogues. There is a parallel usage in Rob Roy (5: 28.36). And if one consults (which of course Lewis could not) the electronic databases, one finds that ‘orbit’ was used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for ‘sphere’ in the sense of ‘eye’. So Scott the poet-novelist can be observed instinctively selecting a word with more than one overtone: the light makes the sphere of the planet shine with the liquidity of an eye; Mannering’s astrological propensities activate the Platonic sphere; and astronomically the planet orbits the sun. This is a classic case where an adverse criticism can lead to an appreciation of a striking verbal felicity. Scott’s general lack of stylistic ostentation, too, can provoke under-­ appreciation or misunderstanding. In the course of a generally sensitive stylistic analysis Robert K. Gordon criticises a sentence referring to the mutual affection of Edith Bellenden and Henry Morton in The Tale of Old Mortality: ‘Love indeed was not yet mentioned between them by name, but each knew the situation of their own bosom, and could not but guess at that of the other’. In such wooden, unfeeling prose Scott does not even make a decent pretence of being interested in the love story.9 Understated and detached the sentence may be, but its careful balance suggests restrained sensitivity rather than lack of interest. It exhibits in fact what Gordon appreciates later in his article (17), a quality ‘like quiet eighteenth-century prose, graceful, balanced’, and entirely appropriate to the subject in context. One may compare part of Arthur James Grant’s perceptive analysis of the style: ‘In the quieter passages it moves with ease and dignity, and it is certain that those who have read Scott most find in the style harmonies and effects not suspected at the first reading’.10 Grant and Gordon (in his second comment) are not lone voices. Over the years – unobtrusively and in a rather piecemeal way, as isolated utterances rather than part of a conversation – a number of critics have

24 Style produced sensitive characterisations and assessments of Scott’s style: ‘Nobody rises from his works without a most vivid idea of what is related, and no one is able to quote a single phrase in which it has been narrated’ (Walter Bagehot in 1858);11 ‘In vocabulary, phrasing, the cast and turn of sentences, there is as little character and stamp as the individuality of authorship may well admit. If anything is to be praised it is a certain plain gravity, proceeding partly from this very absence of pose’, and Scott can, when he chooses, put ‘power and dignity … even into the artificial, super-literary English, which he inherited from the eighteenth century’ (A. E. Verrall in 1910);12 he ‘practised many shades and varieties of style, which must be noticed if we are to appreciate his range’ (Oliver Elton in 1924);13 ‘By the sheer strength and certainty of his imaginative vision he has galvinised … well-worn phrases into fresh and vivid life. The cliché has become the mot juste’ (Lord David Cecil in 1933);14 ‘Behind him we find Johnson, Horace Walpole (Gothic or ungothic), Hume, Mrs. Radcliffe, and so on. Now he will remind of Goldsmith’s limpidity, now of Clara Reeve’s sententiousness, but he does nothing to surprise us, except in the wonderful use to which he puts the different parts of his inheritance’ (E. M. W Tillyard in 1958);15 ‘Scott frequently uses language in such a way as to avoid the implication that anything actually takes place beyond the words themselves. He hesitates to pretend outright that the events of his romance are anything more than imagined events – what might happen rather than what does or did occur’ (Alexander Welsh in 1963);16 ‘Scott’s apparently cumbersome Latinisms, in fact, work like a shorthand. They rapidly give us an accurate general impression’ (Angus and Jenni Calder in 1969);17 ‘“Lifeless English and living Scots” is a false opposition because it overlooks the fact that for Scott the analytical intelligence was not lifeless’ (A. O. J. Cockshut, again in 1969);18 Scott’s ‘leisurely, polysyllabic, undistinguished manner … expresses very well an aspect of the persona by which he achieved his great and beneficial hold over so vast a readership. The apparent unconcern about getting the story going, the lack of pressure and the easy-going detachment, the philological asides, became the accepted foibles of a writer of infinite good faith, immense reserves of authority and great power to give pleasure when the time was ripe’ (D. W. Jefferson, yet again in 1969);19 ‘By and large, what appears in the English dialogue of Waverley is an extraordinary richness’ (Terry H. Grabar in 1971);20 in Scott’s best work ‘the felicities of the language are inseparably bound up with the activity of a lively, judging intelligence’ (Robin Mayhead in 1973);21 ‘not enough attention has been paid to the way in which Scott uses language to bring the historical tension underlying his novels to the fore’ (Fernando Toda in 1985);22 Scott depends ‘on a generalizing diction that tells us what the scene signifies but does not dramatize it vividly’ (Thoda L. Flaxman in 1987);23 in the opening chapters of A Legend of the Wars of Montrose ‘three beginnings employ

Style  25 different vocabularies, involve different degrees of narrative distance, operate at distinct levels of generality, and suggest at least three kinds of (or approaches to) history. The crucial point is that they set into play a multiplicity of perspectives that blocks the closure of a simple, unitary understanding’ (Ina Ferris in 1988);24 there has been a general neglect by critics of ‘the quixotic aspects of the Waverley Novels’ and ‘the element of authorial and textual play at work in the novels’ opening pages’ (Patricia S. Gaston in 1991);25 in the presentation of the executioners in Quentin Durward (15: 76.31–37) ‘the laconic note is wholly characteristic of Scott’s prose at its most subtly effective’ (Simon Edwards in 2001);26 in The Antiquary we find a ‘stylistic patchwork of literary styles, genres, allusions, different languages, inset songs, pictures, and tales: an unrestful, provocative narrative style engendering a sense that themes are being problematized, not just presented’ (Helen Phillips in 2004);27 ‘Scott’s narrator values not brevity but cohesiveness, the easy connection between one sentence and the next through clear markers of relationship and causal cohesion’ (Andrew Elfenbein in 2009); 28 Donald Davie’s rewording of ‘in order to discover whether it might be possible to obtain’ as ‘to see if he could get’ in The Heart of Mid-Lothian (6: 171.4–5) ‘substitutes a language that deals with things for one that deals with relations, and belongs in quite another novel. Scott’s wording gives us the mission as pessimistically conceived by Middleburgh – its orotundity is to be subject to interpretation, not simply allowed to roll over us’ (Martin Dodsworth in 2012);29 ‘Aligned with the external narrator in the present tense of modernity, readers of the novels know that what they are “seeing” in the present tense of the represented world no longer exists but experience it (almost) as if it does. They may be pulled into this world but never completely’ (Ina Ferris, once more, in 2013). 30 John Buchan’s overall assessment is less striking than some of the comments extracted in the monstrous preceding sentence, but it is generally fair: ‘the staple of his writing, even when he is least inspired, is sound and workmanlike’.31 For a good example of Scott’s narrative style at its unostentatious best one may take the opening paragraph of Letter Eleven in Redgauntlet: You are now to conceive us proceeding in our different directions across the bare downs. Yonder flies little Benjie to the northward, with Hemp scampering at his heels, both running as if for dear life, so long as the rogue is within sight of his employer, and certain to take the walk very easy so soon as he is out of ken. Stepping westward, you see Maggie’s tall form and high-crowned hat, relieved by the fluttering of her plaid upon the left shoulder, darkening as the distance diminishes her size, and as the level sunbeams begin to sink upon the sea. She is taking her quiet journey to the Shepherd’s Bush. (17: 84.26–34)

26 Style The paragraph is perfectly controlled throughout, the reminiscence of Wordsworth’s poem ‘Stepping Westward’ unobtrusive but potentially telling, and the final sentence memorable by virtue of its extreme simplicity. One can often sense Scott revelling in the challenge of sustaining a long sentence (it can also be a challenge for modern readers with short syntactical attention spans). A fine example in Guy Mannering constitutes a single paragraph, set off by the preceding, very simple, sentence, also a single paragraph: About four years after this time, a great commotion took place in the county where Ellangowan is situated. Those who watched the signs of the times, had long been of opinion that a change of ministry was about to take place; and, at length, after a due proportion of hopes, fears, and delays, rumours from good authority, and bad authority, and no authority at all – after some clubs had drank Up with this statesman, and others Down with him – after riding, and running, and posting, and addressing, and counter addressing, and proffers of lives and fortunes, the blow was at length struck, the administration of the day was dissolved, and parliament, as a natural consequence, was dissolved also. (2: 31.18–28) The single long sentence there revels in the frenetic variety of political activity leading to the inevitable conclusion. A good example of elaboration being followed, rather than preceded, by a plain sentence can be found in Waverley, where Bradwardine dilates on the distinction between occasional and habitual drunkenness, employing circumlocution and Latin terminology. The concluding circumlocution, ‘the vinous stimulus’, is immediately followed by the dismissive ‘And now let us proceed to breakfast, and think no more of this daft business’, where ‘daft’ deflates all that has gone before (1: 56.15–27). In an article based on computer analysis of the prose style of Scott and several of his contemporaries and immediate successors, Frederick Burwick has demonstrated that Scott’s dominant narrative mode is the Ciceronian grand style. 32 The most distinctive feature of this style is the ‘periodic’ sentence, of which the paragraph from Guy Mannering just cited is a typical example. A series of parallel clauses delays the completion of the sentence till the arrival of the main verb, requiring a substantial degree of controlled energy in writer and reader alike. As Adam Smith put it in one of his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in 1762–63, Cicero ‘always runs out into a long train of connected members, even on the most simple subject’, with ‘ornaments of similarity, of cadence, and uniformity of length in the several members’. 33 Burwick’s analysis shows that Scott’s adherence to this conservative style was

Style  27 unusual in the early nineteenth century. Most prose writers preferred the less formal style advocated by rhetoricians such as Hugh Blair and Lord Kames, governed by the natural association of ideas. Their model was followed, with different emphases, by Francis Jeffrey, Susan Ferrier, John Galt, and James Hogg. Scott chooses, for his own purposes, to continue to write in the Classical tradition of Dryden and Johnson (especially the Johnson of The Rambler). This requires concentration in the reader, but there is nothing mechanical about it. Some sentences can, as we have seen, be very short. In the longer sentences the main verb may come at any point, from the beginning onwards, and periodic sentences often carry on after a delayed main verb, as in this example from the opening chapter of Anne of Geierstein: Still, although the decisive victories which obtained liberty for the Swiss cantons, as well as the spirit of resolution and wisdom with which the little confederation had maintained themselves against the utmost exertions of Austria, had spread their fame abroad through all the neighbouring countries; and although they themselves were conscious of the power which repeated victories had acquired, yet down to the middle of the fifteenth century, and at a later date, they retained in a great measure the wisdom, moderation, and simplicity of their ancient manners; so much so, that those who were intrusted with command of the troops of the Republic in battle, were wont to resume the shepherd’s staff when they laid down the truncheon, and, like the Roman dictators, to retire to complete equality with their fellow citizens, from the eminence to which their talents, and the call of their country, had raised them. (22: 4.27–40) Readers prepared to trust Scott can enjoy an exhilaratingly varied and energetic syntactical experience: at his best he hears what he is writing (he was able to shift to dictation when he was having difficulty using a pen), and it is good to accustom oneself to follow the movement of his prose with the inner ear, or even reading aloud as was a widespread practice in his time. The 150-word sentence from Anne of Geierstein may appear formidable, but the two ‘although’s guide the reader firmly towards the ‘yet’ and the main verb ‘retained’. It could have ended with ‘ancient manners’, but the second semicolon gives the opportunity for a pause before embarking on the final fifty words. Most of Scott’s punctuation was supplied by intermediaries: the compositors would have been mainly responsible for this – it was a recognised part of their job – and their highly skilled input is of immense assistance to readers. There remains to be considered the vexed question of Scott’s polysyllables. Although, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, the young C. S. Lewis objected to the polysyllabic texture, he strikes a more positive note four decades later in his Edinburgh address: ‘The cheerful rattle

28 Style of his polysyllables (often energetic in rhythm even where flaccid in syntax and vocabulary), the very sense that not much care is being taken, and the brisk, virile pace, all help us to feel that we are off on a journey of pleasure’.34 There is no doubt that Scott was fond of polysyllables. He is the only major writer of the period whose uses of ‘apartment’ outnumber ‘room’ (half as many again): even Smollett, whose style comes closest to his own, has a quarter more ‘room’s than ‘apartment’s, and Ann Radcliffe a half more. (In Fielding ‘room’ outnumbers ‘apartment’ by more than four to one, in Edgeworth by nine to one, and in Jane Austen by fifteen to one.) Scott is also given to the over-use of space-filling adjectives such as ‘melancholy’, ‘unfortunate’, and ‘unhappy’: Donald Davie suggests that these ‘have no more function … than just to import a hollow dignity’.35 But Lewis perceives that Scott actually revels in his polysyllables, anticipating Robert C. Gordon’s suggestive statement that for him ‘an English sentence was not an ordered spatial entity at all, but a barely separable unit of narrative energy’. 36 One can sense this energy pulsing through the polysyllables in the long sentence just quoted from Anne of Geierstein. There is a fine example of polysyllables being played off against shorter words in a paragraph from a novel not usually praised for its style, The Fair Maid of Perth: The prisoners were dragged off to the battlements. But while the means of execution were in the act of being prepared, the apothecary expressed so ardent a desire to see Catherine once more, and, as he said, for the good of his soul, that the maiden, in hopes his obduracy might have undergone some change even at the last hour, consented again to go to the battlements, and face a scene which her heart recoiled from. A single glance showed her Bonthron, sunk in total and drunken insensibility; Ramorny, stripped of his armour, endeavouring in vain to conceal fear, while he spoke with a priest, whose good offices he had solicited; and Dwining, the same humble, obsequious-looking, crouching individual she had always known him. (21: 348.14–24) Much of the force of that paragraph comes from the tension between the monosyllables and disyllables and the polysyllabic abstractions ‘obduracy’ and ‘insensibility’. Often polysyllables contribute to a sense of amused detachment from the subject, as in The Pirate, where an entertainingly prolonged sentence culminates with a deflationary abstract phrase: But the house of Clinkscale was allied (like every other family in Scotland at the time) to a set of relations who were not so nice – tenth and sixteenth cousins, who not only acknowledged their kinswoman Baby after her marriage with Yellowley, but even condescended to

Style  29 eat beans and bacon (though the latter was then the abomination of the Scots as much as of the Jews) with her husband, and would willingly have cemented the friendship by borrowing a little cash from him, had not his good lady (who understood trap as well as any woman in the Mearns) put a negative on this advance to intimacy. (12: 30.23–32)

2 At the beginning of the second volume of Waverley the Author undertakes to ‘proceed in my story with all the brevity that my natural style of composition, partaking of what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus, will permit me’ (1: 122.14–17). Scott does not often tell a story in a straightforward way. He typically hedges his narrative about with features which his periphrastic, ambagitory, or circumbendibus sentence structure is designed to accommodate. The quoted passage itself exemplifies his constant playfulness and elaboration. ‘Ambagitory’ seems to be a coinage (the usual form, itself not common, is ‘ambagious’). The term ‘circumbendibus’ (usually a noun, but here probably being used adjectivally) was a humorous invention of Dryden’s that became popular during the eighteenth century, most prominently in Goldsmith’s classic comedy She Stoops to Conquer, but Scott is specifically recalling Pope’s ‘the Periphrasis, which the Moderns call the Circumbendibus’ in his Peri Bathous.37 The circumbendibus style is capable of embracing a wide variety of rhetorics. There are conflicting jargons from the characters, resulting in richly comic effects at times, as in The Antiquary when Oldbuck, Sir Arthur, and Mr Blattergowl produce ‘three strands of the conversation’ which, ‘to speak the language of a rope-work, were again twined together into one undistinguishable string of confusion’ in a ‘pyebald jargon’ (3: 150.4–8). The narrative voice modulates through a number of modes. D. W. Jefferson observes that Scott ‘saw no objection to the absorption into the novel of materials that could just as well have appeared in a work of history, topography or antiquarian scholarship. Here is a kind of literature in which the factual and the fictitious, with their alternating and contrasting effects, are on very good terms’.38 There is formal historical analysis as in the opening chapters of A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, The Monastery, and Quentin Durward. There are dissertations such as that on gypsies in Guy Mannering (2: 35.8–37.10). There is forensic analysis like that centring on Kennedy’s body in the same novel (53.26–55.33). There are various sorts of legal documents: for example, again in Guy Mannering, a will (220.25–36); a record of an interrogation in the The Heart of Mid-Lothian (6: 204.33–207.3); and Mary’s act of abdication in The Abbot, translated from Scots and

30 Style paraphrased (10: 199.4–25). There are extracts from journals and gazettes, as in Waverley (1: 133.36–134.5, 254.8–255.12). There are miniature periodical essays such as that on the disagreeable impression made by a house opened for the auction of its contents in Guy Mannering (2:  74.4–17), and that in Chronicles of the Canongate on the often deleterious effects produced on society by stage-coaches (20: 29.34–31.7): its fictional author Chrystal Croftangry was attracted by the idea of bringing out a regular literary periodical ‘as like to the Spectator, or the Guardian, the Mirror, or the Lounger, as my poor abilities may be able to accomplish’ (51.25–27). There is elaborate and often extravagant pulpit rhetoric, Joseph Tomkins’s address in the first chapter of Woodstock being a particularly entertaining example (19: 13.26–16.22). There are anecdotes presented as such by the Author or by a character: in Waverley, of the Gilliewhackit bridal as recounted by Evan Dhu (1: 94.12–95.11);39 in Saint Ronan’s Well, of a dog trained to steal sheep, narrated by the Author (16: 304.9–13); and in Redgauntlet, of a cow judged to have drunk a doch an dorroch, recalled by Fairford senior (17: 9.4–9). And there are anecdotes absorbed into the fiction, as with the stray bullet hitting Flora in Waverley (1: 256.11–26), Pleydell’s clerk whose competence is unimpaired by copious potations in Guy Mannering (2: 232.9–24), and very briefly in Redgauntlet the Jacobite who ‘lost the music-bells in Edinburgh, for playing “Ower the water to Charlie,” upon the tenth of June’ (17: 216.41–43). The Author talks in The Tale of Old Mortality of ‘embodying into one compressed narrative many of the anecdotes which I had the advantage of deriving from Old Mortality’ (4b: 13.4–6), and a goodly number of such absorbed anecdotes are identified in the Magnum edition: at one stage the eewn editors half-seriously considered entitling Volumes 25a and 25b ‘Scott’s Anecdotes’!40 There are routine quasi-editorial notes, apparently introduced randomly, such as those explaining ‘rere-supper’ and ‘Familists’ and identifying a quotation from Thomas Campbell in Woodstock.41 In the same novel a similar identification of a Fielding quotation moves into Authorial self-mockery: ‘We observe this couplet in Fielding’s farce of Tumble-down Dick, founded on the same classical story. As it was current in the time of the Commonwealth, it must have reached the author of Tom Jones by tradition – for no one will suspect the present author of making the anachronism’ (19: 275.40–43). There is the language of advertisements employed to introduce Woodbourne in Guy Mannering (2:  102.15–19), and for the Author’s metaphorical postchaise at the outset of Waverley (1: 26.27–28). There is a (mock) onomastic/etymological treatise in The Antiquary (3: 283.17–284.3). There are distinctive and memorable mots: again in The Antiquary, Oldbuck’s ‘a walk in the garden once a day is exercise enough for any thinking being’ is derived from Scott’s predecessor as Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire (84.25–26); and in Redgauntlet Peter Peebles’ comment as his endlessly

Style  31 protracted case is about to be heard, ‘I have not been able to sleep for a week for thinking of it, and, I dare to say, neither has the Lord President himsell’, is based on the recollections of ‘an excellent judge’ known to Scott (17: 129.19–20; 25a: 126.10–16). There are numerous songs and a great deal of poetry (traditional, borrowed, and partly or wholly original). There are letters a-plenty. There are inset stories short and long. And, as will be observed later in this study, there are proverbs galore. A particularly attractive aspect of Scott’s endless variety is that his readers can seldom anticipate the mode of the next scene or chapter. Radical modulations take place very quickly. The Author notes in Waverley that his narrative style is (like men in love) ‘to one thing constant never’ as Balthasar’s song in Much Ado About Nothing puts it: ‘I … hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character’ (1: 97.20–24). As we shall see, Scott was dismissive of suggestions that he was a modern Shakespeare, but this lack of predictability is among the areas where he is at his most Shakespearean. One obvious reason for the variety has already been noted in passing: Scott’s allusiveness, though pervasive, is by no means uniformly evident throughout any novel. There are occasional chapters without textual references of any sort: in Waverley, for example, Chapter 8 (the description of the village at Tully-Veolan, though it is otherwise rhetorically complex), Chapter 31 (Waverley’s examination by Melville and Morton), and Chapter 51 (basically straight narrative). At the other extreme in the same novel are Chapters 10 (full of Bradwardine’s pedantry) and 36 (equally full of Gilfillan’s biblical allusions). Readers will adjust their reactions accordingly, and many of them will choose to read the more densely allusive chapters selectively if not skip them altogether.

3 Scott’s narrative mode appears to have the aim of keeping his readers at a distance from the events of the stories: it certainly has that effect. It is essentially the style he adopted for his editorial work, notably in the essays and notes for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802–03 and his edition of Dryden in 1808. The earliest critic to spot this was the English lawyer John Leycester Adolphus in his very perceptive Letters to Richard Heber, Esq. M. P. containing critical remarks on the series of novels beginning with “Waverley,” and an attempt to ascertain their author, first published (anonymously) in London in 1821. Comparing the style of the Author of Waverley and that evident in Scott’s acknowledged editorial work on Dryden he observes: ‘Their usual phraseology is of that learned and somewhat formal description, very generally adopted for the ordinary purposes of literature, and which, with reference to the business of authorship, may be called technical’.42 In our own time Jane

32 Style Millgate has noted that the editorial style adopted in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, an elaborately edited collection of ballads and similar pieces, ‘– what was to become Scott’s basic prose voice for the remainder of his career – emerges as lively but in no way idiosyncratic; the manner, deliberately adopted, is that of the historian and scholar rather than the enthusiast; and the local and personal touches are controlled by the prevailing detachment’.43 Even if readers should feel caught up in the action recounted in this ‘technical’ style, it can only be for a short while. The Author frequently reminds them that they are engaged in reading a book: as Alison Lumsden observes, ‘Scott’s foregrounding of the fictionality of the novel form … both informs, and is at times the central preoccupation of, much of his art’.44 Guy Mannering tells Julia he is not anxious about Bertram’s ‘getting the estate of Ellangowan, though such a subject is held in absolute indifference no where except in a novel’ (2: 317.32–34), and on the morning of the excursion to the ruined abbey in The Antiquary the Author remarks that the weather ‘was as serene and beautiful as if no pleasure party had been intended; and that is a rare event, whether in novel-writing or real life’ (3: 127.9–11). There are repeated foregroundings of chapter divisions, with references to ‘a subsequent chapter’, ‘the next chapter’, and so forth in Waverley (1: 12.3–4, 19.38). The physical makeup of the (usually) three-volume novel comes in for emphasis. At the very beginning of Waverley the characterisation of the typical Gothic novel rejected as a model includes ‘some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts’ (4.3–5). Compare in the same work ‘the hints we noticed at the end of the fourteenth chapter of the last volume’ (133.3–4), and in Guy Mannering ‘The reader may recollect the description of this ruin in the sixth chapter of our second volume’ (2: 277.7–8). Attention is drawn to the time actually involved in the process of perusing passages. Chapter 11 of The Heart of Mid-Lothian begins: ‘We have been a long while in conducting Butler to the door of the cottage at Saint Leonard’s. Yet the space which we have occupied in the preceding narrative [thirty eewn pages] does not exceed in length that which he actually spent on Salusbury Crags upon the morning which succeeded the execution done upon Porteous by the rioters’ (6: 95.10–14). Later in the same novel, on a smaller scale, Jeanie’s feelings in the Willingham rectory ‘passed through her mind, much faster than our pen and ink can record, or even the reader’s eye collect the meaning of its traces’ (291.24–26). In the novels an Authorial voice frequently addresses the reader directly, encouraging, apologising, cajoling, bargaining. The Fieldingesque opening chapters of Waverley have several such interventions,45 and the second volume commences (1: 121.8–122.17) with a spirited exploration of the respective powers of Author (who has absolute control over what

Style  33 appears on the page), and reader (who can stop reading at any point). After beginning the second chapter of Guy Mannering in antiquarian mode with much historical-biographical information, the Author wryly refers to ‘the New Place of Ellangowan, in which we left our hero, better amused, perhaps, than our readers’ (2: 9.31–32). Similarly, in The Antiquary, the remark ‘I will be more merciful to my readers than Oldbuck was to his guest’ follows a display by that gentleman of antiquarian pedantry which not many readers are likely to have read with much attention, though one can sense Scott’s delight in sending up one of his own enthusiasms (3: 284.4–5). There are frequent comments on matters of fictional technique. The Author often explains how he is arranging matters, especially but by no means exclusively at the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. An extended example occurs in Redgauntlet when he is moving from epistolary to third-person narrative, and then to journal (17: 125.6–126.8, 143.31–34). Four instances of the many briefer asides designed to keep the reader on board narratologically will illustrate something of their variety. In Chapter 18 of Guy Mannering: ‘The scenes which followed have been partly detailed in Mannering’s letter to Mr Mervyn; and to expand what is there stated into further explanations would be to abuse the patience of our readers’ (2: 96.17–20). At the beginning of Chapter 33 of the same novel: ‘Glossin had made careful minutes of the information derived from these examinations. They threw little light upon the story, so far as he understood its purport; but the better informed reader has received, through means of this investigation, an account of Brown’s proceedings’ (178.23–31). At the end of Chapter 40 in The Antiquary: ‘Murmuring to himself such scraps of cynical philosophy, our Antiquary paced the sands towards Knockwinnock; but it is necessary we should somewhat outstrip him, for the purpose of explaining the reason of his being so anxiously summoned thither’ (3: 318.9–12). And near the beginning of Chapter 34 of Peveril of the Peak, where the Author explains his decision to deprive Sir Geoffrey Hudson of his knighthood so as to avoid confusion with the established Sir Geoffrey Peveril: ‘we drop occasionally the title of knighthood, which the King had bestowed on him in a frolic, but which might introduce some confusion into our history’ (14: 352.26–28). In The Fortunes of Nigel the usefulness of the soliloquy is asserted as a way of conveying a character’s thoughts in a ‘more concise and spirited’ manner (13: 246.7–28), and later there is an extended discussion of changing fashions in concluding narratives with nuptials, ending with the sentence ‘The experienced reader may have already remarked, that the last chapter was employed in sweeping out of the way all the unnecessary and less interesting characters, that I might clear the floor for a blithe bridal’ (397.8–28). A particularly amusing instance of Authorial highlighting of a narrative problem can be found in The Surgeon’s Daughter, when Adam Hartley suddenly turns

34 Style up in the military hospital where Middlemas is confined: ‘The manner in which he became qualified to render his comrade assistance, requires some short explanation’ (20: 219.13–14). The explanation that follows is far from short, and even further from probable. Also entertaining is the Author’s way of introducing Staunton’s history in Chapter 34 of The Heart of Mid-Lothian: At the risk of being somewhat heavy, as explanations usually prove, we must here endeavour to combine into a distinct narrative, information which the invalid communicated in a manner at once too circumstantial, and too much broken by passion, to admit of our giving his precise words. Part of it, indeed, he read from a manuscript, which he had perhaps drawn up for the information of his relations after his decease. (6: 298.20–26) In the motto composed by Scott for Chapter 33 of The Monastery it seems one hears the Authorial voice complaining about the difficulties in bringing the narrative to a conclusion: Now on my faith this gear is all entangled, Like to the yarn-clew of the drowsy knitter, Dragg’d by the frolic kitten thro’ the cabin, While the good dame sits nodding o’er the fire – Masters, attend; ’twill crave some skill to clear it. (9: 300.34–38) It is possible the motto refers to the complexity of the issues facing Eustace and Boniface, but these do not feature centrally until the following chapter. True, the plot of The Monastery is far from complex, but it may be Scott has in mind the problems involved in winding the action up so as to leave material for The Abbot, effectively the second part of a single novel.46 In the course of taking the reader into his confidence the Author often acknowledges digressions and indulgences. He ends his extended analysis of the amicable relationship between Meg Dods and Tyrrel in Saint Ronan’s Well with the sentence ‘In short, to come back to the point at which we perhaps might have stopped sometime since, landlady and guest were very much pleased with each other’ (16: 144.2–4). In Chapter 13 of The Pirate he is prompted by Minna’s infatuation with Cleveland to indulge in a lengthy essay on the providential purpose descernible in the frequency of marriages ‘betwixt persons totally differing in feeling, in taste, in pursuits, and in understanding’, excusing himself somewhat coyly at the end: ‘Having a certain partiality for the dark Beauty whom we have described, we have willingly dedicated this digression, in order to account for a line of conduct which we allow to seem absolutely unnatural in such a narrative as the present, though the most common event in ordinary life’ (12: 124.5–7, 125.36–40). Even a modest single

Style  35 paragraph contrasting Queen Elizabeth and James VI and I, prompted by Nigel’s arrival at Greenwich, in The Fortunes of Nigel is followed by the standard formula ‘To return from this digression’ (13: 296.1–24). The same is true of a brief reference to the modern state of the Edinburgh Luckenbooths in The Heart of Mid-Lothian (6: 48.23–34), and of a yet briefer gnomic comment on ‘a regard for personal appearance’ as ‘a species of self-love’ in Kenilworth (11: 284.35–41). When a narrative persona is introduced in the Waverley Novels, it is seldom sustained for long.47 The Author-as-editor, drawing on pre-­ existing sources for his narrative, is a recurrent device, but it is adopted only momentarily for a particular effect, then dropped as quickly. Near the beginning of Waverley the young hero’s verses are said to have been transferred to Aunt Rachael’s commonplace book: ‘From thence they were extracted when the volume itself, with other authentic records of the Waverley family, were exposed to the inspection of the unworthy editor of this memorable history’ (1: 24.13–16). Similarly, in Quentin Durward, the Author observes: ‘In this place, the Memoirs which we have chiefly followed in compiling this true history, were unhappily defective; for, founded chiefly on information supplied by Quentin, they conveyed no information concerning the dialogue which, in his absence, took place betwixt the King and his secret counsellor’ (15: 142.4–8). Neither novel makes any attempt to sustain this fiction. In Guy Mannering Scott has much fun with the idea of Author-as-editor dealing with the multiple textual problems presented by Mannering’s journal accounts of the ‘first literary characters of Scotland’ whom he encounters in Edinburgh (2: 226.8–37). His wider enjoyment of this sort of transparent mystification is evident also in his introduction of Cromwell’s speeches to Wildrake in Woodstock with the sentence ‘We will be as concise in our statement, as our desire to give the very words of a man so extraordinary will permit’ (19: 84.23–24). The fiction whereby the four series of Tales of my Landlord are supposed to have been edited by Jedidiah Cleishbotham from the manuscripts of his young deceased colleague Peter Pattieson, containing stories told mainly by visitors to the inn at the imaginary Gandercleugh, is foregrounded from time to time, mainly in the preliminary material or the introductory chapters to the individual novels. But thereafter it disappears, apart from the occasional pedantic footnote ascribed to Cleishbotham, or isolated utterances in the text. Thus, in The Heart of Mid-Lothian the assertion that the situation of the Edinburgh tollbooth ‘is well known to all men’ suggests Pattieson or Cleishbotham (6: 48.9), whereas the Author can be presumed to be speaking in his own person when he says of the spot where Butler encounters Robertson/Staunton ‘It is, as many of my readers may know, a deep, wild, grassy valley’ (95.31–32). But a later reference to ‘my last occasional visit to the metropolis’ seems to be intended to remind the reader of the Pattieson/Cleishbotham fiction (193.12–13). Given this manner of proceeding, it seems impossible to determine with

36 Style any certainty whether Author, Pattieson, or Cleishbotham is meant to be responsible for the controversial concluding moral of the novel, addressed to the reader (468.30–36), though the fact that an ‘Envoy’ by Cleishbotham follows may suggest that the moral is not his. The reader is not allowed to share the point of view of any character for long. Scott constantly draws attention to the presence of the omniscient, or partly scient, Author/narrator. Typically, as in Waverley, this is signalled by phrases such as ‘I know not whether’ (1: 20.31), ‘I am well assured that’ (43.27), ‘Some such thoughts crossed Waverley’s mind’ (36.16), and ‘David Gellatley was in good earnest the half-crazed simpleton which he appeared’ (58.35–36). The narrative device is more prominently on display at the end of Chapter 18, where the Author follows a detailed description of Fergus’s physiognomy with the sentence ‘It was not, however, upon their first meeting that Edward had an opportunity of making these less favourable remarks’ (96.36–37) and then proceeds to end the chapter with the following paragraph (97.4–10): We will take the opportunity to introduce the reader to some particulars of Fergus Mac-Ivor’s character and history, which were not completely known to Waverley till after a connection which, though arising from a circumstance so casual, had for a length of time the deepest influence upon his character, actions, and prospects. But this, being an important subject, must form the commencement of a new chapter. Later in the novel there occurs what is to become a standard distancing procedure (a variant of the occupatio of Classical rhetoric) introduced with the words ‘With a mind more at ease, Waverley could not have failed to admire the mixture of romance and beauty which renders interesting the scene through which he was now passing’, followed by an enumeration of ‘objects fitted to arouse and interest a romantic imagination’ (202.13–23). Scott distances the reader further from the narrative by frequent Authorial comments on the action. These can be very brief, as when the stag-hunt at the beginning of the second chapter of Waverley is termed ‘The work of destruction’ (1: 123.37), or when the vivid description of the killing of the stage in The Bride of Lammermoor prompts a reference to ‘the art of hunting, or of butchery, whichever the reader chuses to call it’ (7a: 81.34–35). But the comments can be more extensive, sometimes introducing an ironical or a consciously modern sentiment. An extended and spirited description of the tournament in Chapter 12 of Ivanhoe ends with these words: Thus ended the memorable field of Ashby-de-la-Zouche, one of the most gallantly contested tournaments of that age; for although only

Style  37 four knights, including one who was smothered by the heat of his armour, had died upon the field, yet upwards of thirty were desperately wounded, four of whom never recovered. Several more were disabled for life; and those who escaped best carried the marks of the conflict to the grave with them. Hence it is always mentioned in the old records, as the Gentle and Free Passage of Arms of Ashby. (8: 115.27–34) The ‘Hence’ is masterly, as is the mischievous implication of ambiguity in ‘Gentle’. Later in the same novel the reader is invited to draw back from the engaging picture of King Richard with a substantial Authorial endorsement of Ivanhoe’s reservations about the propriety of his conduct in the disturbed state of his kingdom (365.11–25). A specifically modern perspective can be observed in Waverley, when there is a stop on the journey to Edinburgh: They halted at Linlithgow, distinguished by its ancient palace, which, Sixty Years since, was entire and habitable, but the venerable ruins of which, not quite Sixty Years since, very narrowly escaped the unworthy fate of being converted into a barrack for French prisoners! May repose and blessings attend the ashes of the patriotic statesman, who, amongst his last services to Scotland, interposed to prevent this profanation. (1: 203.24–30) Another introduction of a modern perspective, in the description of Péronne in Quentin Durward, was the subject of an exchange between Scott and his right-hand man James Ballantyne. The sentence in question reads: Indeed, though lying on an exposed and warlike frontier, it was never taken by an enemy, but preserved the proud name of Peronne la Pucelle, until the Duke of Wellington, a great destroyer of that sort of reputation, took the place in the memorable advance upon Paris in 1815. In the manuscript this forms part of the normal text, but in proof Ballantyne commented: ‘Very funny, and I well know you will retain it. But it breaks the tone, quoth JB’. Scott responded ‘You may knock out the brains & serve them on [or ‘in’] a plate by themselves – ie. make a note of the passage if you have a mind’. Ballatyne did just that (no doubt glad to demote a sentiment not only modern but risqué), so that the sentence became a footnote (15: 273.40–43). The modern perspective can be evident in just a word or two, as when in Waverley the ‘two barelegged damsels’ at Tully-Veolan ‘performed with their feet the office of a patent washing-machine’ (1: 40.17–19). Sibyl Jacobson has commented

38 Style suggestively on the effect of the foregrounding of the modern perspective shared by Author and reader: The narrative frame … distances us from the action by reminding us of our chronological removal from those days and the immediacy of the action which brings those days to life. The double perspective is important, for it not only creates a dynamic tension in the novel, but it signals two methods of reading that tension: an extrinsic reading in which we see at a remove and locate meaning in the historical forces at work upon the hero and an intrinsic reading in which the meaning emanates from the developing consciousness of the hero.48 Many of the Authorial comments take the form of utterances of gnomic wisdom, varying from a single phrase to a substantial paragraph. These are often quasi-proverbial truisms, which Scott does not eschew any more than Shakespeare does, though the Author sometimes recognises that truth and triteness can go hand in hand. In Chronicles of the Canongate Crystal Croftangry introduces his account of Mrs Baliol’s bequest with a paragraph containing an extended version of a routine image, embellished with a proverb: When we set out on the jolly voyage of life, what a brave fleet there is around us, as stretching our fresh canvass to the breeze, all “shipshape and Bristol fashion,” pennants flying, music playing, cheering each other as we pass, we are rather amused than alarmed when some awkward comrade goes right ashore for want of pilotage! – Alas! when the voyage is well spent, and we look around us, toilworn mariners, how few of our ancient consorts still remain in sight, and they, how torn and wasted, and, like ourselves, struggling to keep as long as possible off the fatal shore, against which we are all finally drifting! I felt this very trite yet melancholy truth in all its force the other day, when a packet with a black seal arrived, containing a letter addressed to me by my late excellent friend Mrs Martha Bethune Baliol. (20: 55.28–40) Trite the sentiment may be, but it is imagined with some spirit here. A large number of Waverley gnomicisms were brought together by Owen Redfern in a 300-page collection entitled The Wisdom of Sir Walter (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1907), that just cited (without the final comment) appearing on page 158, under the heading ‘Life’, with six others.49 These include an example prompted by the conduct of Argyle in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, beginning with a familiar biblical allusion: ‘when the small still voice within a man’s own breast, which

Style  39 tells him that his life is of consequence to himself, is seconded by that of numbers around him, who assure him that it is of equal advantage to the public, history affords many examples of men … who have consulted self-preservation when the temptations to it were so powerfully increased’ (7b: 150.16–21). Ian Maclaren’s observation in the Introduction to Redfern’s compilation may be considered to be of its time; it is certainly in need of qualification, but it still has much force: The mind of Scott is always worth having, because it is so honest and fair, so charitable and friendly, so shrewd and sagacious. … When you have read what he says about pride and remorse, about religion and friendship, about English gallantry and English good-nature, about women and children, about Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans, about selfishness and happiness, about dogs and horses, about honour and love, and a hundred other subjects within the range of life, then you are bound to have a saner as well as friendlier outlook upon your fellow-creatures. (xi) Maclaren mentions dogs and horses, so here is one gnomic expression on each subject included in Redfern’s compilation, the first from Anne of Geierstein, the other from Saint Ronan’s Well: … the expression which may be seen in the countenance of a faithful dog, when the creature indicates sympathy with his master’s melancholy, though unable to ascertain or appreciate its cause. (22: 305.19–22) There is a sort of instinct by which horses perceive the humour of their riders, and are furious or impetuous, or dull and sluggish, as if to correspond with it. (16: 330.32–34) There is indeed a separate little sixty-page book devoted to Sir Walter’s Dogs, including both the succession of companion animals in his household and his fictitious canines.50 On the smallest scale passing generalisations contribute to the gnomic effect. Godfrey Bertram in Guy Mannering is ‘a thorough gossip, as most weak men’ (2: 10.34). At the beginning of Waverley Sir Everard’s change of mind regarding his inheritance illustrates the general truth that ‘an hour of cool reflection is a great matter, when employed in weighing the comparative evils of two measures, to neither of which we are internally partial’ (1: 9.2–4). And in The Abbot Roland finds on entering Edinburgh that ‘all other feelings were suspended in the sensation of giddy astonishment with which the inhabitant of a solitary country is affected, when, for the first time, he finds himself in the streets of a large and populous city, a unit in the midst of thousands’ (10: 135.4–8).

40 Style The offerings of gnomic wisdom, long or short, play their part in keeping the reader at a distance from the action. Scott’s continuing of the time-honoured custom of assigning generic names to minor characters or to places is a closely related device with similar effect: ‘little Tom Alibi the solicitor’ (1: 31.25–26); ‘Mr Rubrick’ the nonjuring clergyman (1: 48.21); ‘Mr Protocol, an attorney in Edinburgh’ (2: 193.41–194.1); ‘Mrs  Mailsetter’ the postmistress (3: 110.1); ‘John Tapster’ and ‘Will Hostler’ at the Bonny Black Bear (11: 2.9–10); ‘Master Maulstatute … a Justice of the Peace’ (14: 340.33–34); ‘Doctors Tourniquet and Lancelot’ (20: 223.8–9); ‘the ministerial borough of Barterfaith’ (1: 7.34); ‘the lands of Haltweary, or … those of Halfstarvet’ (3: 27.22–23); and ‘Alan Fairford, Esq. Advocate, of Clinkdollar’ (17: 378.24). 51 One of the most persistent and prominent features of Scott’s style, and a further manifestation of his disposition to analytical distancing, is a tendency to qualify statements. This is particularly striking at the beginning and end of Waverley. The description of the hamlet of Tully-Veolan is full of reservations (‘somewhat resembled … perhaps might even have thought … at the first glance, at least a stagnation of industry, and perhaps of intellect … upon the whole’ (1: 35.31–36.12)). That last phrase ‘upon the whole’ recurs in the remarkable final sentence of the narrative. The Author cannot say that Waverley and Rose lived happily ever after. Rather there is a triple qualification: ‘It only remains for me to say, that as no wish was ever uttered with more affectionate sincerity, there are few which, allowing for the necessary mutability of human events, have been, upon the whole, more happily fulfilled’ (362.25–28). Such reservations stand in the way of any easy or simplistic reading. Julian Meldon D’Arcy highlights an earlier qualification in the description of Waverley’s uneasy reflections on the Hanoverian/Jacobite quandary he finds himself faced with: ‘Whatever were the original rights of the Stuarts, calm reflection told him, that, omitting the question how far James the Second could forfeit those of his posterity, he had, according to the united voice of the whole nation, justly forfeited his own’ (149.7–11). The qualifying clause ‘omitting the question … posterity’, D’Arcy suggests, makes the reader not in thrall to a British perspective ‘aware of what the narrative voice is really implying: although the Hanoverian monarchy may indeed be a successful de facto one, it is by no means a de jure one. … Scott uses this duality to undermine the loyalist surface reading of Waverley with subversive nationalist statements’. 52 Writing of The Heart of Mid-­ Lothian Robert C. Gordon writes perceptively of the moral implications of Scott’s tentative Authorial style: Nowhere in the Waverley Novels is Scott’s narrative style more suited to his subject than in the chapters leading up to the trial of Effie. Here we may observe a combination of influences – the scholarly caution of the judicious historians and editors Scott knew so well,

Style  41 the stylistic reticence of the legal report, above all, perhaps the ironically tentative manner of Fielding, who, by occasionally withholding narrative information, judges by implication those of his characters who are too quick to condemn his heroes on the basis of gossip. 53 Gordon goes on to suggest that this style (full of phrases such as ‘appeared to announce’ and ‘seemed to be ashamed’) ‘implies an explicit criticism of those characters in the novel who are dogmatic and self-­ assured’ (91), and at the end of his study he asserts that it ‘meets the demands of his subject in ways whose strangeness to us is an indication of something we have lost’, expressing a ‘catholic and humane’ view of his often far from catholic or humane subject matter (171). A further distancing device involves the failure of certain characters to treat serious moments with due solemnity. Oldbuck and Hector proceed to Steenie’s funeral in remarkably good spirits at the beginning of the third volume of The Antiquary (3: 242.25–246.43), and Oldbuck comes close to sabotaging Elspeth’s death scene by insisting on taking down her snatches of ballads in his memorandum-book (310.16–311.11). There are comic moments during Effie’s trial and immediately after it in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, 54 and later in the same novel another big scene, Jeanie’s interview with the Queen, is entertainingly interlaced with Argyle’s anxiety as she inadvertently touches on awkward subjects: ‘The deuce take the lass, thought the Duke of Argyle to himself; there goes another shot – and she has killed with both barrels right and left’ (6: 338.43–339.2). Scott’s constant distancing of the action has been seen by some as a defect from his own time to the present. Several of the early reviewers complained about the unsettling effect of the abrupt transitions from serious to comic. The Augustan Review objected in its article on Guy Mannering: At one moment he enraptures us with associations quite romantic, or almost suspends our breath with images of horror: and next moment he elaborates with prodigious skill, pictures of disgusting coarseness and vulgarity. This incongruous combination destroys the interest we feel in the story, while it forces us to acknowledge the talents of the writer. It is like an attempt to combine in the same picture, the humor of Hogarth – with the wild and savage energy of Salvator Rosa.55 In a parallel complaint in a marginal note Coleridge noted that Scott was ‘always half and half’ in his depiction of the supernatural, as with the presentation of the Bodach Glas in Waverley: The appearances are so stated as to be readily solved on the simplest principles of Pathology: while the precise coincidence of the event

42 Style so marvellously exceeds the ordinary run of Chances, as to preserve the full effect of Superstition for the Reader, and yet the credit of Unbelief for the Writer. 56 A further complementary objection was made by Wordsworth, in a letter of 25 April 1815 to R. P. Gillies. He was reacting specifically to the presentation of Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering, published the previous year: In the management of this lady the author has shown very considerable ability, but with that want of taste, which is universal among modern novels of the Radcliffe school, which, as far as they are concerned, this is. I allude to the laborious manner in which everything is placed before your eyes for the production of picturesque effect. The reader, in good narration, feels that pictures rise up before his sight, and pass away from it unostentatiously, succeeding each other. But when they are fixed upon an easel for the express purpose of being admired, the judicious are apt to take offence, and even to turn sulky at the exhibitor’s officiousness. 57 In our own time Joan Pittock has made a similar point about Scott’s distancing effect as a whole, suggesting that it has a serious limitation as well as a number of advantages: The shifting viewpoint of the narrator, now a stranger or traveller, now an antiquary, now ignorant or learned as the case may be; the preponderance of narrative which is diversified in tone, mingled as it with satiric dialogue, epistolary explanation, farce, dramatic soliloquy, scenic description, create a high degree of susceptibility in the reader to atmosphere and mood. … The projection of fiction as such, as a tale to be told, is perhaps as valuable a way of novel-­ writing as any other. It doesn’t in that case though present the fiction as a microcosm claiming an existence independent of the reader in which he must fully participate on both moral and emotional levels. The distancing effect practised by Scott alerts the imagination to be refreshed rather than educated. 58 It is certainly true that Scott invites his readers to stand back and admire the ‘effect’ of scenes such as Bradwardine reading the evening service to his troops in Waverley (1: 237.9–18), or of Caleb reluctantly opening the door at Wolfscrag in The Bride of Lammermoor: At length Caleb, with a trembling hand, undid the bars, opened the heavy door, and stood before them, exhibiting his thin grey hairs, bald forehead, and sharp high features, illuminated by a quivering

Style  43 lamp which he held in one hand, while he shaded and protected its flame with the other. The timorous cautious glance which he threw around him – the effect of the partial light upon his white hair and illumined features, might have made a good painting; but our travellers were too impatient for security against the rising storm, to permit them to indulge themselves in studying the picturesque. (7a: 60.40–61.5) In this latter work such a highlighting may be considered to have a peculiar effectiveness, since Peter Pattieson states at the end of the introductory chapter that, ‘following in part, though not entirely, my friend Tinto’s advice, I endeavoured to render my narrative rather descriptive than dramatic’ (14.25–26). But The Bride of Lammermoor is by no means the only novel where the pictorial effect of scenes is highlighted. In Guy Mannering the scene criticised by Wordsworth for being fixed as it were on an easel is indeed ‘an excellent subject for the pencil of Calotte’ (2: 43.11–12), and later the reading of Mrs Bertram’s will ‘might have made a study for Hogarth’ (220.24); Steenie’s funeral in The Antiquary is ‘a scene, which our Wilkie alone could have painted, with that exquisite feeling of nature that characterizes his enchanting productions’ (3: 247.27–29), and in the following chapter Rembrandt is invoked for a subsequent scene in the same cottage (256.2–9); the reunion of David and Jeanie Deans at Roseneath leads the Author (here very clearly writing as Scott) to say that ‘should I ever again see my friends Wilkie or Allan, I will beg, borrow or steal from them a sketch of this very scene’ (6: 375.18–20). In Ivanhoe a later manuscript illustration appears to be in the Author’s mind as he stands back from Isaac in Cedric’s hall: ‘Had there been painters in those days capable to execute such a subject, the Jew, as he bent his withered form, and expanded his chilled and trembling hands over the fire, would have formed no bad emblematical personification of the winter season’ (8: 48.27–30). Some of the effects are consciously engineered by characters in the novels: Meg Merrilees’ anathema is a notable case in point, as is Flora’s stage-managed recital at the waterfall in Chapter 22 of Waverley (1: 112.13–117.12). Readers will be divided between those who respond positively to the repeated ‘cooling’ of the narrative involvement by inviting the reader to stand back and contemplate a scene or analyse the action, and those who find it unsatisfying. It is not self-evident that the moral and emotional engagement of the first group is necessarily defective.

4 There is a wide variation between the novels, and between volumes of individual novels, depending on whether the narrative voice or the dialogue reported by that voice predominates. Frank Jordan has pointed out

44 Style that the narrator’s domination of Waverley yields in its two immediate successors to a more dramatic method. 59 Even excluding the introductory chapters, nearly three-quarters of the first volume of Waverley is in the narrative voice, with Scott in Fieldingesque mode as observed above. But gradually characters are allowed to speak more for themselves, and by the final volume they occupy nearly half the space. The first volume of Guy Mannering reverts to the pattern of Waverley’s opening, but there is a steeper mutation and in the final volume dialogue is marginally dominant. Most readers will recognise that The Antiquary feels like a very different sort of novel, and this is due in no small measure to its taking over where Guy Mannering left off and pushing the dialogue further so that it takes up nearly three-quarters of the final volume: it is essentially a conversational novel, dominated by the loquacious Oldbuck. As A. N. Wilson has observed: ‘It is talk which this book celebrates, and talk which makes it live’.60 With his first and third novels Scott sets the extreme limits of narrative and dialogue for the series. The only publication to repeat Waverley’s narrative dominance is an exceptional case, Chronicles of the Canongate, in which (excluding the Croftangry material) ‘The Highland Widow’ is strongly narrative, distinguishing it from its companion ‘The Two Drovers’ where speech nudges into the lead, partly owing to the judge’s long address to the jury. In ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’ dialogue is unusually thin, especially in the opening and concluding part of the narrative. At the end of the previous section it was noted that in The Bride of Lammermoor Peter Pattieson makes a point of trying ‘to render my narrative rather descriptive than dramatic’ in response to Dick Tinto’s criticism that his characters ‘make too much use of the gob-box; they patter too much’ (7a: 14.26, 10.36–37). It is true that the narrative voice dominates throughout, most strikingly in the final volume with its visual set pieces, but it is more dominant not only in Waverley, Chronicles of the Canongate, and Guy Mannering, but also in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, where the first and fourth volumes offer a predominating narrative voice framing the more dialogic inner volumes. At the opposite end of the spectrum, The Antiquary is matched by The Fortunes of Nigel as a novel full of loquacious characters from King James downwards. Very close behind in the predominance of dialogue are two late Scottish works, The Fair Maid of Perth and Castle Dangerous, and following those Kenilworth, The Abbot, and Woodstock. Part of the difference between The Abbot and its predecessor and companion The Monastery arises from the fact that, although the earlier work has much pseudo-Euphuistic verbiage from Sir Piercie Shafton,61 it is The Abbot that has more dialogue overall. An important factor in the structure of Kenilworth is the move from the intensely dialogic opening volume to a narrative emphasis in the castle with its pageants as the catastrophe approaches. There are similar striking internal shifts

Style  45 in the opposite direction in Ivanhoe and Redgauntlet. In the former the heavily narrative opening volume yields to two even more strongly dialogic volumes, perhaps indicating an increasing confidence in the peculiar speech devised for medieval speakers, ‘not Anglo-Saxon or early Middle English but a mixed, artificially created language – a base of early nineteenth-century English with elements of earlier English added to give a flavour of “oldness”’. So Graham Tulloch, who would endorse the comment by the reviewer of Ivanhoe for the Monthly Review: ‘A critical reader, we will venture to say, will perceive that the dialogue of ‘Ivanhoe’ belongs to no precise age, but bears the nearest affinity to that of Elizabeth and of Shakspeare’.62 In Redgauntlet the initial exchange of letters is, as one would expect, comparatively low in quoted speech, on a level with opening volumes of the first two novels, but the final volume is almost as full of dialogue as The Antiquary and The Fortunes of Nigel.63 Although the varying proportions of narrative voice and speech between and within novels are an important part of the distinctive textural experiences they offer, one should be a little wary of the argument advanced by Frank Jordan in another article, that after the unified design of the Fieldingesque Waverley Scott moves into a Romantic fictional form, with less Authorial guidance, where ‘we must read him as we must read Wordsworth’s poems, with a taste for imaginative participation in narrating the story’.64 It is not that Jordan’s words are unilluminating: quite the reverse. E. T. Channing made a similar suggestion when reviewing Roy Roy on its original appearance: You are in the midst of life, gaining knowledge as well as entertainment, by a process akin to actual experience and observation. Every man is in his proper situation, and suitable discourse is put into his mouth, – we have the peculiarities of his gait, the expression of his face, the tone of his voice, every thing, in short, which is significant of character, or that adds to its reality; – and these are not given once for all in a formal description, but they come out in connexion with his feelings, situation or employment, and vary with them.65 But it would be unhelpful to link this reader participation too closely with the dialogic difference between Scott first novel and those that follow. The inexhaustible debates Waverley has provoked are eloquent evidence that its narrative mode requires just as much reader participation and active interrogation as the later, more dramatic, novels – some of which are not self-evidently less unified in their design than Waverley: Quentin Durward, The Talisman, and The Fair Maid of Perth spring to mind. A further reason for not exaggerating the effect of the shifting between narrative and speech is that the English dialogue is often not far from

46 Style the Authorial narrative style. This was first pointed out in a long and brilliant review of Woodstock by the Westminster Review. The Westminster was a radical publication, founded by Jeremy Bentham, and its Woodstock article is clearly designed as an all-out frontal assault on the Tory author of the Waverley Novels. Although it is wholly negative, the stylistic analysis in particular is first-rate: It is curious to remark how uniformly the speakers in these romances express themselves after the same manner, however various their degrees of rank, and remote from each other the periods of their existence. … The author whose phrases the dialogue most frequently echoes is Shakspeare. … This is not evinced so much by the quotations which are thickly strewed up and down, as by the unconscious adoption of Shakspearian forms of speech by almost every character in the story. … Every man, woman, and child, that has aught to say, speaks by figure, and is ready with an illustration. … It is, in short, a language sui generis; and, if it indicates any character at all, indicates none but its author’s. … There is, however a species of diversity in the language, which is the most curious feature of the dialogue. The cavalier knight, an old man of the old school, speaks quaintly and curiously; but the knight’s son and daughter use nearly the language of the present day, whilst the king is a gallant of the nineteenth century.66 The whole of the article will repay careful reading, but one is under no obligation, in learning from its acute analysis, to accept its negative evaluation, any more than that in Coleridge’s comment prompted by his perusal of Quentin Durward: ‘Sir W. Scott’s Conversation scenes are always interesting because the thoughts are so – but they are utterly characterless. Neither Quentin or Ludovic speaks, but Sir W. S.’ .67 Graham Tulloch has acutely observed that ‘a not insignificant part of [Scott’s] thought-processes was quite naturally carried on in the words of others’, and that ‘What was natural to himself he carried over to his created characters’.68 One of the most fascinating aspects of the Waverley Novels is the way readers can appreciate the individuality of the English-speaking characters while at the same time often hearing the Authorial voice in their speech. In its review of The Abbot, the New Monthly Magazine notes that, unlike Shakespeare, Scott is forced by this tendency for his characters to speak a generalised universal language ‘perpetually to discriminate his persons by fear lest his readers should confound them. They always seem conscious of their vocation, and appear almost as if they were acting parts, and anxious at every moment not to forget their cue, or deviate from the peculiarities allotted to them’.69 The point is well made, but although Shakespeare’s superiority here may readily be conceded, Scott’s procedure can be appreciated in its own right.

Style  47

5 A crucial element in the texture of the Waverley Novels is Scott’s pervasive use of images: there are over 6500 of the Author’s own, and many more introduced to the narration by way of intertextual allusions and quotations.70 Seeing things in terms of images came naturally to Scott from his early years. A fellow-pupil at the seminary run by a Mr Morton, which Scott attended in Edinburgh for supplemental tuition while at the High School, recalls: His imagination was constantly at work, and he often so engrossed the attention of those who learnt with him, that little could be done  – Mr Morton himself being forced to laugh as much as the little scholars at the odd turns and devices he fell upon; for he did nothing in the ordinary way, but, for example, even when he wanted ink to his pen, would get up some ludicrous story about sending his doggie to the mill again.71 It is impossible to draw a rigid line between images and routine metaphorical language, but the distinction can be observed in a passage from Woodstock, where ‘the Everards had regained their former stronghold in the General’s affections’. This hardly registers as an image, any more than ‘the infant Commonwealth’ three lines later, but at the end of the paragraph a similar military expression is flagged up: ‘in many a case, where wars have been waged for points of metaphysical right, they have been at last gladly terminated, upon the mere hope of obtaining general tranquillity, as, after many a long siege, a garrison is often glad to submit on mere security for life and limb’ (19: 69.8–27). Scott ranges in his images from the cliché to the totally original, from the barely noticeable to the striking. A purely mechanical, knee-jerk image can be observed in the course of a landscape description in ‘The Highland Widow’: ‘At the bottom of the fall the rivulet with difficulty collected, like a routed general, its dispersed forces, and, as if tamed by its descent, found a noiseless passage through the heath to join the Awe’ (20: 72.40–73.1). In Waverley, when Rose ‘tripped off demurely enough till she turned the first corner, and then ran with the speed of a fairy’, the image has little impact (1: 45.42–43). There is a totally different effect three pages later when the elaborate description of Baillie Macwheeble’s odd way of moving, in Tristram Shandy mode, ends with the sentence ‘Hence, when he waddled across the court to and from his old grey poney, he somewhat resembled a turnspit walking upon its hind legs’ (48.12–14). The reader has recently encountered a still more entertaining display of Scott’s ability to come up with striking images in a set of three when Davie Gellatley first appears (we have already noted the ‘patent washing-machine’ on this page):

48 Style Sometimes this “mister wight” held his hands clasped over his head, like an Indian Jogue in the attitude of penance; sometimes he swung them perpendicularly, like a pendulum, on each side; and anon he flapped them swiftly and repeatedly across his breast, like a hackney coachman, as a substitute for his usual flogging exercise, when his carriage and cattle are idle on the stand in a clear frosty day. (40.33–39) Later on in the same novel, Scott produces a simile of T. S. Eliot’s ‘patient etherised upon a table’ variety for the hero’s feelings at the Holyrood assembly on the eve of the battle of Prestonpans: If, my dear reader, thou hast ever happened to take post-horses at ——, or at ——, … you must have observed, and doubtless with sympathetic pain, the reluctant agony with which the poor jades at first apply their galled necks to the collars of the harness. But when the irresistible arguments of the post-boy have prevailed upon them to proceed a mile or two, they will become callous to the first sensation; and being warm in the harness, as the said post-boy may term it, proceed as if their withers were altogether unwrung. This simile so much corresponds with the state of Waverley’s feelings in the course of this memorable evening, that I prefer it (especially as being, I trust, wholly original) to any more splendid illustration, with which Byshe’s Art of Poetry might supply me. (221.40–222.10) A good example of an unexpected, but entirely appropriate, image is De Vaux’s observation in The Talisman: ‘I have known many a resolute ruffian … who valued his own life as little as it deserved, and would troop to the gallows as merrily as if the hangman were his partner in a dance’ (18b: 67.26–28). Another comes from Albany in The Fair Maid of Perth: ‘Were your Majesty to throw down your warder when the war is high, and these men’s blood is hot, it would meet no more regard than if a sparrow should drop among a herd of battling wolves the straw which he was carrying to his nest’ (21: 229.3–6). Conventional images may be given an original slant. Armies likened to waves or a swarm of bees are commonplace,72 but this is far from the case in Count Robert of Paris when after the defeat of their tribe Bertha and her mother are ‘among the miserable creatures who yet hovered about the neighbourhood of the convent, like a few half-scorched bees about their smothered hive’ (23a: 211.38–40). A slight touch can bring a dead image to life, as in Ivanhoe when Urfried/Ulrica observes maliciously of Rebecca that she has ‘a skin like paper, ere the priest stains it with his black unguent’ (8: 194.9–10). In The Betrothed the Author

Style  49 draws attention to the way he has taken a traditional Miltonic simile and applied it an unexpected way: At length the scene of slaughter seemed concluded – the retreat was blown on many a bugle, and knights halted on the plain to collect their personal followers, muster them under their proper pennon, and then lead them slowly back to the great standard of their leader, around which the main body were again to be assembled, like the clouds which gather around the evening sun – a fanciful simile, which might yet be driven farther, in respect of the level rays of strong lurid light which shot from these dark battalions, as the beams were flung back from their polished armour. (18a: 77.36–78.1) Particular image chains often help to give individual novels their own feel. The most striking example is afforded by Kenilworth, with its tightly knit sequences of ornithological and nautical images and tropes of hunting, entrapment, and ascent.73 The Talisman is another taut narrative, drawn together effectively by the three scenes at the Diamond of the Desert (reinforced throughout by references to actual and metaphorical jewels) and the triple identity of Saladin. In some novels images of warfare are unusually prominent. The sense of fatality in Guy Mannering is increased by military and mechanical images, while in The Bride of Lammermoor the Ashtons and Caleb wage metaphorical war, to grim and mock-heroic effect respectively. Elsewhere animal imagery is particularly pervasive. In Ivanhoe the Normans are given to insulting Jews and Saxons by calling them dogs and pigs, and in The Betrothed canine and vulpine insults are directed against the Welsh. In The Fair Maid of Perth emphasis falls on the wild-cat, symbol of Clan Chattan, the clan of the cat, and in The Talisman the regal lion is prominently associated with King Richard. There are various attempts at regal or noble lions in Quentin Durward, but one remembers rather the bull Charles, the cat Le Dain, and the boar De La Marck dominating the shocking central scene where the Bishop of Liège is struck down by Nikkel Blok ‘as if he had been doing his office in the common shambles’ (15: 242.21–22).

6 Objectors to Scott’s style may be unconvinced by the arguments in its favour adduced in this chapter. They can claim some support from the author himself. Scott is well aware he may be in danger of spoiling the traditional stories that underpin his fiction in the course of retelling them. The best known example involves his handling in The Heart of Mid-Lothian of Helen Walker’s story relayed in a letter from Helen Goldie: ‘If the picture has suffered in the execution, it is from the failure

50 Style of the author’s powers to present in detail the same simple and striking portrait, exhibited in Mrs Goldie’s letter’ (25a: 293.30–32). Scott also confessed to James Ballantyne his fear he might spoil the story of The Bride of Lammermoor drawn from his mother’s oral rendition: ‘Query, if I shall make it so effective in two volumes as my mother does in her quarter of a hour’s crack by the fireside?’ (7a: 272). In the Introduction to Chronicles of the Canongate, the first work to appear after Scott had officially abandoned his anonymity, the Author recounts the original story lying behind the relationship between Waverley and Captain Talbot before admitting: ‘Such is the interesting story which I have rather injured than improved, by the manner in which it is told in Waverley’ (20: 8.17–19). It is a matter not only of detail, but of period style. Scott has Mrs Baliol direct the charge at Chrystal Croftangry, again in Chronicles of the Canongate: And you want to turn composer, my good friend, and set my old tales to some popular tune? But there have been too many composers, if that be the word, in the field before. The Highlands were indeed a rich mine; but they have, I think, been fairly wrought out, as a good tune is grinded into vulgarity when it descends to the hurdy-gurdy and the barrel-organ. Croftangry replies ‘If it be a real good tune … it will recover its better qualities when it gets into the hands of better artists’, but Mrs Baliol remains sceptical (67.5–12). In the introductory chapter to The Fair Maid of Perth the argument is pursued with the two participants largely reversing their roles when considering the reworking of material from formal histories. Croftangry asks ‘What can a better writer than myself add to the elegant and forcible narrative of Robertson?’ and Mrs Baliol responds: This will never do, cousin … you must get over all these scruples, if you would thrive in the character of a romantic historian, which you have determined to embrace. What is the classic Robertson to you? The light which he carried was that of a lamp to illuminate the dark events of antiquity; yours is a magic lantern to raise up wonders which never existed. No reader of sense wonders at your historical inaccuracies. (21: 9.27–29, 34–40) For some readers the straightforward recounting of the stories of Helen Walker and Janet Dalrymple provided for the Magnum edition of The Heart of Mid-Lothian and The Bride of Lammermoor (25a: 290–93, 335–38), or the formal historians Scott drew on for other novels, will be more telling than his fictional elaborations. The bald stories, the good old tunes, and classic chroniclers of the calibre of Robertson or Hume,

Style  51 undoubtedly have their own considerable force. But Scott’s more complex creations have multiple rewards to offer those prepared to accept the challenges he presents as a condition of ever greater appreciation and enjoyment. The distinctive style, challenging but rewarding, of the Waverley Novels is devised, then, to be capable of including a wide range of rhetorics, and to afford constantly varied entertainment for a remarkably wide spread of readers. Its energy is usually subjected to a Ciceronian syntactic control, its effect characteristically detached and analytic. The relationship between narrative voice and speech is an important factor in achieving variation within individual novels and between novels. The pervasive imagery, ranging from the conventional to the strikingly original, unifies individual novels and again helps to distinguish them from each other. This is the matrix designed to incorporate the results of Scott’s extensive researches in his library and his wide experience of the world outside. The next chapter will explore some of the strategies deployed to facilitate that incorporation.

Notes 1 Ian Duncan, in Gottlieb, 19 and 93. 2 John Lauber, Sir Walter Scott, rev. edn (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1989), 32. 3 C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, ed. Walter Hooper, 3 vols (London: HarperCollins, 2000–06), 1. 92: [10 November 1914], to Arthur Greeves. 4 Ibid., 1.185: 28 May 1916, to his father. 5 C. S. Lewis, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, in his They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), 93–104 (100, 102). 6 British Magazine, 1 (March 1823), 19–33 (19). 7 C. S. Lewis, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, in his They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), 93–104 (100). 8 12 October 1945. C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, ed. Walter Hooper, 3 vols (London: HarperCollins, 2000–06), 2.677. 9 Robert K. Gordon, ‘Scott’s Prose’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3rd series 45 (June 1951), section 2, 13–18 (14). For the sentence criticised see 4b: 111.1–3. 10 Scott, ed. Arthur James Grant (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909), xxxiii. 11 Walter Bagehot, ‘The Waverley Novels’ (1858), reprinted in his Literary Studies, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1879), 2, 146–83 (182). 12 A. E. Verrall, ‘The Prose of Walter Scott’, Quarterly Review, 213 (July 1910), 33–53 (35, 52). 13 Oliver Elton, Sir Walter Scott (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), 72. 14 Lord David Cecil, Sir Walter Scott (London: Constable, 1933), 22. 15 E. M. W. Tillyard, ‘Scott’s Linguistic Vagaries’, Études Anglaises, 11 (1958), 112–18 (112). 16 Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 190. 17 Angus and Jenni Calder, Scott (London: Evans Brothers, 1969), 109. 18 A. O. J. Cockshut, The Achievement of Walter Scott (London: Collins, 1969), 28. 19 D. W. Jefferson, ‘The Virtuosity of Scott’, in Jeffares, 53–71 (57).

52 Style 20 Terry H. Grabar, ‘The English Dialogue of Waverley’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 1 (1971), 30–42 (41). 21 Robin Mayhead, Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 7–8. 22 Fernando Toda, ‘Archaisms and Scotticisms: Language and Historical Point of View in Rob Roy’, Anglo-American Studies, 5 (1985), 23–33 (23). 23 Rhoda L. Flaxman, Victorian Word-Painting and Narrative: Toward the Blending of Genres (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 15. 24 Ina Ferris, ‘The Historical Novel and the Problem of Beginning: The Model of Scott’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 18 (1988), 73–82 (77). 25 Patricia S. Gaston, Prefacing the Waverley Prefaces: A Reading of Sir Walter Scott’s Prefaces to the Waverley Novels (New York: P. Lang, 1991), 4. 26 Simon Edwards, ‘The Geography of Violence: Historical Fiction and the National Question’, Novel, 34 (2001), 293–308 (305). 27 Helen Phillips, ‘Scott and Chaucer: Ekphrasis, Politics, and the Past in The Antiquary’, Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies, 61 (2004), 25–42 (27). 28 Andrew Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 166. 29 Martin Dodsworth, ‘Scott’s Prose, Gathering Meaning, and the Art of Fiction’, Essays in Criticism, 62 (2012), 354–72 (366–67). 30 Ina Ferris, ‘“Before Our Eyes”: Romantic Historical Fiction and the Apparitions of Reading’, representations, 121 (2013), 60–84 (78). 31 John Buchan, Sir Walter Scott (London: Cassell, 1932), 338. 32 Frederick Burwick, ‘Associationist Rhetoric and Scottish Prose Style’, Speech Monographs, 34:1 (March 1967), 21–34. 33 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres Delivered in the University of Glasgow by Adam Smith Reported by a Student in 1762–63, ed. John M. Lothian (London: Nelson, 1963), 154. 34 C. S. Lewis, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, in his They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), 93–104 (102). 35 Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 15. The generally impressive concluding chapter of Redgauntlet has a quadruple ‘unfortunate’ on a single page (17: 361.14, 29, 36, and 39). 36 Robert C. Gordon, Under Which King? A Study of the Scottish Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969), 28. 37 Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, 5.175; Alexander Pope, Peri Bathous: Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry, in his Miscellanies (London, 1727), 52. 38 D. W. Jefferson, ‘The Virtuosity of Scott’, in Jeffares, 53–71 (59). 39 In the Magnum Scott says that the anecdote ‘is taken from one which was told to the author by the late Laird of Mac-Nab, many years since’ (25a: 73.32–34). 40 Some of Scott’s best discourses were introduced by the words ‘That puts me in mind of a curious story’: G. A., ‘A Day with Sir Walter Scott’, Metropolitan, 6 (January 1833), 99–104 (100). R. P. Gillies refers to ‘those quaint and concise anecdotes that Sir Walter often introduced in conversation, and in regard to which one peculiarity was, that scarce any of his acquaintance ever heard him repeat the same story twice over; even if one tried to elicit a repetition, some other odd illustrations usually came in place of the anecdote expected’: Recollections of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (published anonymously, London: James Fraser, 1837), 156. 41 See 19: 168.39–43, 321.34–45, 380.41–43. 42 2nd edn (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1822), 68.

Style  53 43 Millgate, 7. 4 4 Alison Lumsden, Walter Scott and the Limits of Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 33. 45 1: 3.8–6.12, 25.40–42, 26.12–31, 95.12–14. 46 See the review of the eewn edition of The Monastery by Clare A. Simmons in Studies in Hogg and his World, 12 (2001), 190–93 (192–93). 47 Such flexibility has often been judged artistically primitive, incompetent, or flippant, but as Wayne C. Booth demonstrated in his now classic study The Rhetoric of Fiction, first published by Chicago University Press in 1961 and with a second edition in 1983, there are many valid narrative techniques. Booth does not include Scott in his discussion, though the first epigraph for his opening chapter is from Scott’s life of Fielding. 48 Sibyl Jacobson, ‘The Narrative Framing of History: A Discussion of Old Mortality’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 1 (1971), 179–92 (184). 49 Recent, shorter examples of ‘wisdom’ anthologies, both compiled by Eric Anderson, are Sir Walter’s Wit & Wisdom, published by the Abbotsford Press (Melrose, 2013), which concentrates on the letters and journal rather than the fiction, and ‘The Wit and Wisdom of Walter Scott’ in Great Scott! Celebrating Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 2014), a booklet ‘created by Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust as part of the Scott 2014 campaign devised by Ali Bowden and taking place at Waverley train station to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Waverley and the 10th anniversary of the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature designation’, [41]–48, [2]. 50 E. Thornton Cook, Sir Walter’s Dogs (Edinburgh: Grant & Murray, 1931). 51 For full listings of Scott’s ‘self-interpreting’ names, one in five of the 2800 names in the series, see Coleman Oscar Parsons, ‘Character Names in the Waverley Novels’, PMLA, 49 (1934), 276–94. 52 Julian Meldon D’Arcy, Subversive Scott (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2006), 58–59. 53 Robert C. Gordon, Under Which King? A Study of the Scottish Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969), 88–89. 54 6: 210.9–11, 214.10–12, 220.39–221.37. 55 Augustan Review, 1 (July 1815), 228–33 (228): the main parts are reprinted in Hayden, 87–89 (87). See also e.g. the review of Waverley in Port Folio, 3rd series 5 (April 1815), 326–333 (330): the Author is ‘reckless of outraging our feelings by an assumed giddiness of style (if we may so term it) difficult to describe, and impossible to participate; of which a remarkable instance is afforded by a sudden transition in which none of his readers will care to follow him, from the bloody scaffold of the gallant Fergus to the vulgar balderdash of a highland hostess’. 56 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, 6 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980–2001), 4, ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley (1998), 581. 57 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–82), 3.232. 58 Joan Pittock, ‘Scott and the Novel of Manners: the Case of St. Ronan’s Well’, Durham University Journal, 66 (n. s. 35) (1973–74), 1–9 (7–8). 59 Frank Jordan, Jr, ‘Walter Scott as a Dramatic Novelist’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 5 (1968), 238–45. 60 A. N. Wilson, The Laird of Abbotsford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 72.

54 Style 61 Sir Piercie’s language is not genuine Euphuism: ‘What Scott was trying to do was give some idea of the exuberance of the Elizabethans as revealed in one of its aspects – the love of pretentious language’: Graham Tulloch, ‘Sir Walter Scott’s Excursion into Euphuism’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 78 (1977), 65–76 (76). 62 Monthly Review, n. s. 91 (January 1820), 71–89 (79). See Tulloch, 14. 63 A full listing of the novels in overall narrative/speech order from Waverley to The Antiquary and The Fortunes of Nigel is as follows: Waverley, Chronicles of the Canongate, Guy Mannering, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, Rob Roy, The Pirate, Redgauntlet, The Betrothed, The Talisman, Quentin Durward, The Black Dwarf, Peveril of the Peak, The Tale of Old Mortality, The Monastery, A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, Saint Ronan’s Well, Ivanhoe, Anne of Geierstein, Count Robert of Paris, Woodstock, The Abbot, Kenilworth, The Fair Maid of Perth, Castle Dangerous, The Antiquary, and The Fortunes of Nigel. In calculating the proportions, introductory material and historical chapters have been discounted, as have distinct stories within stories and documents. 64 Frank Jordan, ‘‘Scott and Wordsworth; or, Reading Scott Well’, Wordsworth Circle, 4 (1973), 112–23 (123). 65 North American Review, 7 (July 1818), 149–84 (150–51). The main parts of this review, which was published anonymously, are included in Hayden, 148–64 (149). Hayden also has (106–12) the bulk of the Critical Review’s article on the first series of Tales of my Landlord which makes a similar point (109). Several other reviewers noted the importance of dialogue for the revelation of character: e.g. notably the Monthly Review in its treatment of Woodstock: ‘Dialogue forms the favourite means, as they are certainly the only legitimate ones, which the author usually adopts for introducing his characters, as well as displaying the manners of the period of which he treats, to his readers’ (3rd series 2 (May 1826), 73–96 (76)). 66 Westminster Review, 5 (April 1826), 399–457 (400–02, 407), partly reprinted in Hayden, 290–99 (290–93, 297–98). 67 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, 6 vols (London, Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1980–2001), 4, ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley (1998), 612. 68 Tulloch, 98–99. 69 New Monthly Magazine, 14 (October 1820), 421–30 (430). 70 By far the most frequent images involve animals, followed by birds, and then Classical, military, and nautical allusions. Taken together these categories account for half of the total. For a useful analysis see Bjorn Tysdahl, ‘Scott’s Imagery: The Beast and the Body’, in Excursions in Fiction: Essays in Honour of Professor Lars Hartveit on his 70th Birthday, ed. Andrew Kennedy and Orm Øverland (Oslo: Novus, 1994), 232–54. 71 Lockhart, 1.103. 72 The standard images are exhaustively analysed by Christabel F. Fiske, Epic Suggestion in the Imagery of the Waverley Novels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940). 73 See J. H. Alexander, ‘The Major Images in Kenilworth’, Scottish Literary Journal, 17:2 (November 1990), 27–35.

4 Strategies

1 In his Introduction to the Tales of the Crusaders the Author depicts himself as chair of ‘a joint-stock company, united for the purpose of writing and publishing the class of works called the Waverley Novels’ (18a: 3.5–7). He presents an ingenious plan by Mr Dousterswivel for producing the more conventional parts of the novels by machine: Gentlemen, it is to be premised, that this mechanical operation can only apply to those parts of the narration which are at present composed out of common-places, such as the love-speeches of the hero, the description of the heroine’s person, the moral observations of all sorts, and the distribution of happiness at the conclusion of the piece. Mr Dousterswivel has sent me some drawings, which go far to show, that, by placing the words and phrases technically employed on these subjects, in a sort of frame-work, like that of the Sage of Laputa, and changing them by such a mechanical process as that by which weavers of damask alter their patterns, many new and happy combinations cannot fail to occur, while the author, tired of pumping his own brains, may have an agreeable relaxation in the use of his fingers. (5.32–43) Scott can often be seen working conventionally or mechanically, keeping the narrative going and allowing the reader to relax for a sentence, or a paragraph, or a page or two. The Author doesn’t mention textual references or images in his auto-pilot list, but he might well have done. In his allusions to texts, as in the pervasive use of images discussed towards the end of the previous chapter, Scott moves between the conventional at one extreme and the strikingly original at the other. On occasion he can indeed be obtrusively mechanical. Guy Mannering has a decidedly offhand biblical allusion following Godfrey Bertram’s death: ‘when the general murmur announced that the unfortunate Mr Bertram had broken his heart in the effort to leave the mansion of his forefathers, there poured forth a torrent of sympathy, like the waters from the

56 Strategies rock when stricken by the wand of the prophet’ (2: 78.24–28). In The Tale of Old Mortality there seems no compelling reason for making the lord-lieutenant’s friends obey the instruction to bring Morton forward at the wappenschaw ‘with the obedient start which poor Malvolio ascribes to his imaginary retinue’ (4b: 23.5–9). At one point, in Saint Ronan’s Well, Scott catches himself out when offering an over-familiar formulaic reference: ‘it was not long ere a dozen of couples and upwards, were “tripping it on the light fantastic toe,” (I love a phrase that is not hackneyed) to the tune of Monymusk’ (16: 195.29–31): the expression has already been used in the novel with the tag ‘to use the appropriate phrase’ (57.15–16). Such extremes of mechanical writing are rare, but there are many examples of allusions that do their job effectively enough but are entirely unremarkable. When in The Antiquary Griselda ‘still flourished in single blessedness’ most readers will easily pick up the echo of Theseus’ classic description of spinsterhood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and pass on (3: 14.14). A few pages later when Sir Anthony Wardour and his son ‘drink healths five fathoms deep’ after the failure of the ’45 Uprising there is another classic expression from Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet (37.37) which will be widely recognised and whose very limited martial resonance will be effortlessly absorbed. A little later again, the majority of readers will spot the Othello source of Lovel’s recollection of Isabella’s ‘hair-breadth scape’ (77.5), and register it as evidence of a tendency on Lovel’s part to think in Shakespearean phraseology (the ‘scapes’ are Othello’s rather than Desdemona’s). Most of Scott’s intertextual references are more distinctive than the automatic or just standard examples cited in the two preceding paragraphs. In Waverley, for instance, the hero’s guide is concerned that the appearance of the moon from behind the clouds will make it more difficult for his party to conceal themselves from the government forces: ‘The Highlander eyed the blue vault, but far from blessing the useful light with Homer’s, or rather Pope’s, benighted peasant, he muttered a Gaelic curse upon the unseasonable splendour of MacFarlane’s buat (i. e. lanthorn)’ (1: 195.39–42). The comparison is in itself unremarkable, but it is given an amusing twist by the pedantic identification of the precise source in Pope’s translation of the Iliad. Even over-used Classical sibyls come into their own with the ladies of the post-office in The Antiquary: ‘Meanwhile the gossips, like the sybils after consulting their leaves, arranged and combined the information of the evening, which flew next morning through an hundred channels, and in an hundred varieties, through the world of Fairport’ (3: 114.26–29).1 And many allusions are still more noteworthy, as an extensive arsenal of strategies is brought into play.

Strategies  57

2 A major reason for the immensely varied texture of Scott’s fiction is his eagerness to satisfy a very wide range of readers. At least half, sometimes considerably more, of the sets of unbound sheets of the first edition of each novel were shipped straight to London. (Print runs of the Waverley Novels in the early 1820s were around the 10,000 mark.) Scott had to keep the average English reader (a woman, most likely) on board at one extreme while not neglecting the Scottish lawyer and antiquarian (a man, certainly) at the other. The former will probably have wanted to skip the elaborate wordplay of (for example) the Baron of Bradwardine and Oldbuck in Waverley and The Antiquary; they will have skimmed over a good deal of the Scots dialogue, such as David Deans’s ‘The brown fouryear-auld’s milk is not seiled [strained] yet, nor the bowies [dishes] put up on the bink [frame]’ in The Heart of Mid-­Lothian (6: 131.37–39);2 in Waverley they will have relished the resonance of Scottish proper names without much understanding of their significance, as in Flora’s battle-­song (1: 115.17–116.20); they will have ignored untranslated Latin quotations such as the line from Ovid in the first chapter of The Bride of Lammermoor (7a: 4.21) and the sentence from Hugo de Groot in the corresponding chapter of A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (7b: 10.25–26); they will have accepted the general effect of the legal terms in Peter Peebles’s increasingly drunken revelling in the details of his case in Redgauntlet (17: 121.41–122.40); and they will not have been aware (without Authorial prompting) of the confusion of centuries in Ivanhoe, which those au fait with such matters may regard leniently ‘in proportion to their knowledge of the difficulty of my task’ (8: 12.4–19). At the other extreme, the Scottish lawyer and antiquarian will have been able to cope with just about anything, but he may well have skimmed or skipped the more routine narrative passages. He has the Author’s permission to do so (not that he can prevent him). We are reminded as the narrator takes over from the correspondence between Darsie and Alan in Redgauntlet, that if we find passages tedious we can follow the practice of ‘such as are addicted to the laudable practice of skipping, (with whom we have at all times a strong fellow feeling)’ (17: 126.6–8). Some readers, indeed, may start by glancing at the last chapter: if they do so in Waverley, they will encounter ‘A postscript, which should have been a preface’ and the dedication to Henry Mackenzie (1: 362.30–365.15). In Chronicles of the Canongate, after an extensive description of the outside of Bethune’s Lodging the narrator says before passing to the interior ‘Dearest reader, if you are tired, pray pass over the next four or five pages’ (20: 58.30–31). But the understandable fear that ‘the gentle reader has not found the latter part’ of Chapter 4 in The Pirate, with its agricultural details, ‘extremely tedious’ comes rather late in the day (12: 39.24–25), as does the equally understandable remark introducing

58 Strategies one of Norna’s songs: ‘We have perhaps preserved too many examples of these incantations; but we cannot help attempting to translate that which follows’ (240.32–34). Scott is quite happy to include a good deal that many of his audience are unlikely to understand fully, or indeed at all. His advocacy of ‘the laudable practice of skipping’ applies not only to chapters or passages perceived as dull, but to obscure words, phrases, sentences, and speeches. The eewn editor of The Fortunes of Nigel observes that Lowestoffe’s ‘jargon of the gaming-table’ (13: 185.8–29) is probably not meant to be understood by either Nigel or the reader: it is there to convey something of the atmosphere of the goings-on at the ordinary or tavern, though on examination it has been found to ‘make sense up to a point’ (601). As Alison Lumsden has acutely observed, ‘the creative impulse behind Scott’s work was one that privileged the complexities and suggestive potentialities of communication above transparency’. 3 The most common reason for not understanding Scott locally is linguistic ignorance, and where references to texts are involved the readers at the greatest disadvantage are those without Latin. From the outset, many will simply have had to accept that they were unable to follow Bradwardine’s Latin allusions in Waverley. In his first speech there are quotations from Virgil (whom he calls ‘Maro’) and Horace (not attributed, but crucial for the local sense), as well as a number of French phrases with which some readers will have been happier (1: 45.17–41). Even those with fluent Latin may well have been puzzled by a game of non-comprehension in Guy Mannering, where Dominie Sampson, objecting to the application of Godfrey Bertram’s new broom to the gypsies, ‘ventured upon an indirect remonstrance. As, however, it was couched in the oracular phrase, “Ne moveas Camerinam,” neither the allusion, nor the language in which it was expressed, were calculated for Mr Bertram’s edification’ (2: 41.27–31). Readers who cannot follow the specific Classical allusion will nevertheless appreciate Sampson’s learned absentmindedness. When the Dominie is said to have engaged ‘in close colloquy with the schoolmaster of Moffat, respecting a disputed quantity in Horace’s 7th Ode, Book II.’, and ‘the dispute led on to another controversy, concerning the exact meaning of the word Malobathro, in that lyric effusion’ a few readers will recollect and understand the point at issue, joined by those who care to consult the modern explanatory note (200.15–20, 550); but most will be content to know that there was a learned controversy taken up by Sampson, and they will be entertained by the outlandish word ‘Malobathro’, as by the other strange names they encounter in these novels. On one occasion, in The Antiquary, the general reader is spared most of the Latin original as Oldbuck forgets Cicero’s words and offers Lovel a complete and correct English translation (3: 31.34–41). In The Fortunes of Nigel, when Nigel and the King conduct a conversation in Latin (and Greek), the Author

Strategies  59 provides a reassuring footnote: ‘Lest any lady or gentleman should suspect there is aught of mystery concealed under the sentences printed in Italics, they will be pleased to understand that they contain only a few common-place Latin phrases, relating to the state of letters in Holland, which neither deserve, nor would endure, a literal translation’ (13: 111.40–43). The reassurance is actually deceptive: those able to follow the Latin will find that much in the exchange is far from commonplace, as the eewn explanatory note indicates (580–81). Another footnote, in Woodstock, moves mischievously from Dr Rochecliffe’s refusal to translate his Latin adages for the likes of Alice to a not dissimilar attitude on the part of the Author: The quotations of the learned doctor and antiquary were often left uninterpreted, though seldom uncommunicated, owing to his contempt for those who did not understand the learned languages, and his dislike to the labour of translation, for the benefit of ladies and of country gentlemen. That fair readers and rural thanes may not on this occasion burst in ignorance, we add the meaning of the passage in the text – “Virtue requires the aid of a governor and director; vices are learned without a teacher.” (19: 316.39–44) The translation here is correct, unlike that offered in Guy Mannering by Bertram, who ‘liked to show his authority in trifles’ and says to his wife ‘The last time I was at quarter sessions the sheriff told us, that dies – that dies inceptus – in short, you don’t understand Latin, but it means that a term day is not begun till it’s ended’: the joke depends on the reader knowing, and the Bertrams not knowing, that the Latin tag means the opposite of what he asserts (2: 46.23–28). Switching languages, the very amusing jest that ends The Heart of Mid-Lothian depends on readers being sufficiently versed in French to understand the phrase from Molière about changing the location of the heart, the final play on that word in the novel (6: 469.3–13). While Scott and selected groups of readers have much fun with inclusion and exclusion, and the endless subtleties that can result from playing one off against another, he is still careful to keep most of his audience sufficiently in the picture most of the time. Graham Tulloch’s detailed and expert analysis of his period and Scottish language demonstrates the range of strategies he uses to keep the bulk of his readers on board linguistically. These range from occasional glosses in footnotes, through definitions incorporated in the text, to manipulation of the context in various subtle ways. ‘While making sure the general drift of his meaning was never in doubt and thus catering for the ordinary reader, Scott offered his better-read reader the pleasure of identifying and understanding the archaic language’. Speeches in Scots are handled in the same way.4

60 Strategies The Author assumes that the general body of his public will be historically aware to a degree. The outcome of the battle of Prestonpans in Waverley, for example, is ‘well known’ (1: 240.35), and although Culloden is only briefly mentioned (364.5) its implied presence will have radically affected many people’s experience of the final chapters. Most of the original readers of that novel would have been acquainted with ‘the feats of Wallace’, but hardly with ‘the cruelties of Wude Willie Grime’ (in the same sentence), of whose identity the modern editor cannot be entirely certain (203.7–8, 581–82). The first description of Mary Queen of Scots in The Abbot takes as its point of departure the fact that ‘her face, her form, have been so deeply impressed upon the imagination, that, even at the distance of nearly three centuries, it is unnecessary to remind the most ignorant and uninformed reader of the striking traits which characterize that remarkable countenance’ (10: 187.13–16), and similarly in Woodstock ‘the figure of Oliver Cromwell was, as is generally known, in no way prepossessing’ (19: 81.10–11). In The Abbot the Author asserts that ‘few readers can be ignorant, that at an early period, and during the plenitude of her power, the Church of Rome not only connived at, but even encouraged such saturnalian licenses as the inhabitants of Kennaquhair and the neighbourhood had now in hand’ (10: 105.28–31); but anyone not possessed of the basic facts of Mary’s career is likely to find many of the incidental historical allusions in that work difficult to follow. In the previous novel, The Monastery, the phrasing makes it likely that Scott is poking fun at this sort of Authorial assumption, either by parodying his own style or by reminding the reader of the earlier stages in the processing of the fictitious Benedictine manuscript source: ‘All the world knows that the cultivators of each barony or regality, temporal or spiritual, in Scotland, are obliged to bring their corn to be grinded at the mill of the territory, for which they pay a heavy charge, called intown multures’ (9: 120.40–121.2). Scott’s familiarity with most of the periods he writes about, derived principally from extensive reading in his library, means that for many readers there will be a sense of almost inexhaustible richness of information, certainly going far beyond their own limited expertise. As the Introduction to the final two volumes of the Edinburgh Edition observes: Even when Scott steps backwards into the middle ages he is capable of demonstrating that he writes from a position of considerable strength in terms of period knowledge, perhaps most strikingly in a trio of neighbouring essays on ‘Abbot of Unreason’, ‘The hobby-horse’, and ‘Representation of Robin Hood and Little John’ (25b, 86–91). This confirms the sense many readers of the Waverley novels will have that these are far from being paper-thin concoctions laboriously assembled from meagre resources. (25a: lxviii–lxix)

Strategies  61 In his Journal entry for 18 October 1826 Scott himself notes an essential difference between his own fiction and the novels of his imitators: One advantage I think I still have over all of them. They may do their fooling with better grace but I like Sir Andrew Aguecheek do it more natural. They have to read old books and consult antiquarian collections to get their information – I write because I have long since read such works and possess thanks to a strong memory the information which they have to seek for. 5 Again and again Scott’s readers will come across a reference by the Author or one of his characters which they could, if they had a mind, investigate further. The beneficiary of an annotated edition will usually find at least some enlightenment in the relevant explanatory note. But many of the original readers will have been content to live with the impression of recessive historical perspective, and probably most of their modern successors will follow their example much of the time. A case in point might be when the blustering Wildrake in Woodstock refers to ‘the Nullifidians of the Rota’ (19: 157.33–34). It will take an exceptionally retentive reader to recall the description at the beginning of the novel of Bletson as ‘a true-blue commonwealth’s man, one of Harrington’s Rota Club, with his noddle full of new-fangled notions about government, the clearest object of which is to establish the tail upon the head’ (26.13–16). And even that initial reference, while it gives just about enough to be going on with about the Club, is likely to raise questions that nowadays only an editorial note or resort to the internet can answer, though there will, no doubt, be a few who can derive satisfaction from the fact that they already know something about the institution. Many of Scott’s original readers will have been impressed with the depth of his historical information, but not all were. In 1825 the reviewer of Tales of the Crusaders for (Baldwin’s) London Magazine complained, of The Talisman in particular: We do not want two pages to tell us the ribbands, and silk, and scarfs, and jewels, that Queen Berengaria wore, nor, for the hundredth time, the casque, and the hauberk, and the spear, and the spear-head, and the shield, and the cuisses, and all the particulars of a coat of full armour, as we may see it on any day for a shilling at the Tower. We are checked in the career of the story, and skip the passages; and we skip them the more angrily, because it is palpable that they are cold antiquarian descriptions, copied from Strutt, or Grose, or others, as it may happen, merely to prolong the writing, and not part of the current of the writer’s mind. If they are meant to show the author’s reading, it is not much to boast of.

62 Strategies But the public has thought fit to imagine that he is profoundly versed in antiquities, and chivalry, and heraldry, and gothic architecture, and so forth, and it little knows, good easy public, how great a way a few terms will go, and how easily those terms are learnt.6 It is impossible to know how many contemporaneous readers shared the reviewer’s dissatisfaction,7 but it can be countered, to some extent at least, by drawing attention to the range of sources enlisted for The Talisman enumerated in the eewn Historical Note (18b: 365–71). Scott’s general success in satisfying his diverse audience, sufficiently attested by the unparalleled commercial success of the Waverley N ­ ovels, may be summed up in the Scotsman’s comment when reviewing the third series of Tales of my Landlord: ‘The Bride of Lammermoor, like all the works of the same author, contains food for all appetites, from the vulgar devourer of romance to the person who possesses the most elevated poetical imagination, – from the common place antiquarian to the critical historian and the reflecting philosopher’.8

3 Scott’s characters often use texts as secret signs to bond with each other. The process is sometimes entirely straightforward. Colonel Talbot and Waverley are on the same social and cultural level, so when Talbot says of his profession ‘but ’tis my vocation, Hal’ (1: 310.3) both he and Waverley know that the original speaker, Falstaff, is referring to purse-taking: the mutually recognised mismatch helps to maintain a tone of civilised detachment in their serious discussion. In Kenilworth Tressilian’s replying in Latin on his first being addressed in that language by Erasmus Holiday ‘had upon the schoolmaster the effect which the mason’s sign is said to produce on the brethren of the trowel’ (11: 87.16–17 – Holiday also add­ resses Gammer Sludge in Latin but without expectation of comprehension on her part). A shared frame of cultural reference is less obtrusively evident when Guy Mannering defends ­Dominie Sampson against his daughter Julia’s strictures even though the dominie ‘has not sacrificed to the graces’, alluding to Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (2: 108.12–13). ­I nter-character textual bonding is often evident in correspondence. Again in Guy Mannering Arthur Mervyn, writing to Mannering, quotes Pope as he complains about the visitors to the Lakes who ‘come to rave, and recite, and madden, about this picturesque land of ours’ (90.32–35); Brown is, like Hamlet, ‘cabbined, cribbed, and confined’ as he puts it in his letter to Delaserre (115.27); and Julia ­Mannering has a reference to Richard III in ‘the keen encounter of our wits’ as she prepares to end her letter to her friend Matilda (101.27). None of these three allusions is signalled by quotation marks.

Strategies  63 Bonding between characters by means of texts is often a more complex matter though. In The Antiquary the very first sentence that Oldbuck addresses, or half-addresses, to Lovel at the coach office is taken directly from Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, where Bobadil asks the Hostess to provide another bedstaff for fencing practice: ‘The woman … does not understand the words of action’ (3: 7.38–40). The quotation is unlabelled, and it could be Oldbuck is simply amusing himself, but ‘an arch glance at his destined travelling companion’ suggests he is sending out a cultural signal. The fact that few readers are likely to spot the allusion lends an enigmatic character to this initial encounter. Lovel does not respond, but since such bonding utterances persist in Oldbuck’s conversations with him it is at least possible that he recognises the allusion, and it soon becomes clear that the two men are conscious of belonging to the same club. As their relationship develops, Oldbuck discovers that Lovel ‘although not possessed of minute information on the subject of antiquities, had yet acquaintance enough with the classics to render him an interested and intelligent auditor when they were enlarged upon’ (10.5–8), and their bonding is cemented by many literary allusions as the narrative progresses, not only to the Classics but to English authors and to stage works in particular (Oldbuck imagines Lovel to be an actor).9 When Oldbuck tells Edie Ochiltree, drawing on Virgil’s Georgics and Cicero’s Ad Atticum, that he should ‘rerum cognoscere causas’ and that ‘the nature and origin of warrant for caption are a thing haud alienum a Scævolæ studiis’ (307.7–9), it may be that he is simply forgetting whom he is addressing, or that he is enjoying patronising or puzzling him, or that he is talking to himself (as he is with a quotation from Tacitus at 318.4–6), or that he is bonding with Hector, or that the Author is bonding with some of the readers – or any combination of these, and maybe other, possibilities. Oldbuck is certainly in the habit of sharing Shakespearean and Classical banter with Hector.10 A similar range of bondings may be surmised when he addresses Griselda less dauntingly, in Lovel’s presence, with ‘perpend my words’ (68.12); and perhaps Isabella, who is after all also a sample of ‘womankind’, is being intentionally excluded when he directs Classical quotations at Sir Arthur (339.28–29, 340.7). And when Oldbuck responds to Lovel’s reading of Isabella’s manuscript ‘The Fortunes of Martin Waldeck’ by quoting part of a couplet from T. J. Mathias’s The Pursuits of Literature (‘I bear an English heart, | Unused at ghosts and rattling bones to start’ (146.32–33)), of those present only Lovel is likely to be able to join the knowledgeable reader in recalling the original of the first line ‘No German nonsense sways my English heart’: certainly Mathias will be totally unknown to Dousterswivel, whom the Author immediately refers to as ‘the German’. In Guy Mannering Pleydell uses an unsignalled allusion to As You Like It to bond with Mannering while excluding Dandie Dinmont: ‘It’s meat and drink to me … to see a clown

64 Strategies like this’ (2: 224.15–16). Similarly his explicit mention of Much Ado about Nothing is intended to be appreciated by Mannering while excluding Hatteraick both by the reference and by the manner of delivery: ‘“A very truculent-looking fellow,” he whispered to Mannering; “but, as Dogberry says, I’ll go cunningly to work with him”’ (343.8–10). In The Pirate Cleveland’s mocking echo of the same play directed at the Provost (‘Spoken like a sensible and quiet magistrate, Mr Mayor’ (12: 325.29)) will pass its target by: perhaps Yellowley will join select readers in getting the point, but such speculations may be allowed to go the way of calculations about the number of Lady Macbeth’s progeny. A speaker may or may not be aware of a literary echo in their own utterance that some readers will pick up. In The Antiquary Edie Ochiltre’s speech on his arrest makes the distinction clear: ‘I shall escape like a bird from the fowler. Play out your play, and never mind me’ (3: 234.33–34). Edie is presumably aware of the reference to Psalms or Proverbs in the first sentence, but he is unlikely to be consciously quoting Falstaff in what follows. Those who spot the allusion to 1 Henry IV will appreciate the Authorial irony: in Shakespeare the sheriff’s party is at the tavern door, but the play to be played out is the mock trial of Falstaff, as Harry by Harry as his father, in which Falstaff will ‘have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff’. When Mary Queen of Scots in The Abbot complains to Henderson that unlike him she is ‘tied to the stake’ the reader will recall both Gloucester in King Lear and Macbeth, adding a resonance it is unlikely Scott intended the queen to be aware of (10: 237.22–24). The one word, ‘jelly’, used by the Author of the eyes of Tomkins whom Josceline has killed in Woodstock, and eerily echoed by Josceline himself, evokes the horror of Gloucester’s blinding, though the allusion is appreciated only by Author and reader (19: 329.15, 351.35). When Wayland Smith in Kenilworth addresses the mercer Goldthread as ‘most puissant mercer’ (11: 240.34) there is a recollection of Metellus’s ‘most puissant Caesar’ in Julius Caesar. Perhaps Wayland is imagined as alluding to the play, with a degree of anachronism; if so, it may be that Goldthread recognises the reference, but nothing is made of that possibility in the text. Most likely Scott is simply borrowing a phrase in period? From time to time the Author addresses limited groups directly, including ‘those who admire the antiquities of the gentle art of angling’ in The Monastery (9: 189.19) and ‘the reader skilful in the antique language of the drama’ in The Abbot (10: 251.46). In The Fortunes of Nigel he teases even those with bibliographical knowledge by asserting that the book provided for Nigel by old Deborah, God’s Revenge against Murther, was ‘not, as the bibliomaniacal reader may easily conjecture, the work which Reynolds published under that imposing name, but one of a much earlier date, printed and sold by old Wolfe’, providing a suitably pedantic bibliographical footnote by Captain Clutterbuck for good

Strategies  65 measure (13: 267.15–18, 40–43). The earlier edition appears to be imaginary, though the publisher is genuine enough. Many of the references to literary texts, especially in the earlier novels, involve a sly bonding with those of Scott’s audience not averse to the risqué, who like himself would treasure the explicit frontispiece to John Hoppner’s Oriental Tales toned down in the second edition, and who might be expected to build that awareness in to their reaction to Waverley’s first attempts to link his reading with a corresponding female counterpart in the real world (1: 20.37–21.3). One of James Ballantyne’s usefulnesses to Scott was his highly developed alertness to anything that might offend the polite reader. A persistent small example of his prudishness is his aversion to the word ‘maiden’, so that in Woodstock Alice Lee, replying to her father, is ‘his daughter’ rather than ‘the maiden’ of the manuscript (19: 20.28), and in The Betrothed Vanda becomes ‘matron’ rather than ‘maiden’ (18a: 129.17). In both cases the manuscript reading is restored in eewn. The replacement by asterisks of the words ‘fathers incestuously accompanying with their own daughters, the son with the mother, and the brother with the sister’, in the quotation from Two Discourses Concerning the Affairs of Scotland by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun in Guy Mannering, is also likely to have been Ballantyne’s work (2: 36.1–3). One suspects that Scott enjoyed seeing what he could get past Ballantyne’s eagle eye: the hints of King James’s homosexual inclinations in The Fortunes of Nigel, for example,11 or in the same novel one of Hildebrod’s variants of the hero’s name (Niggle) which has obscene associations, as has his adjuration ‘in plain words, you must wap and win’ (13: 256.4, 258.40). In Waverley the smoking-room reader will substitute Lindsay of Pitscottie’s ‘The Arse of the World’, in his History of Scotland, for the Author’s ‘the – the – the latter end of the world’ (1: 122.1–2). One may compare the jousting between Oldbuck and Hector centring on the same term in The Antiquary (3: 245.30–36), and the dairy-maid’s hesitation, restored from manuscript in the eewn edition of The Heart of Mid-Lothian: ‘Are you not afeard of these wild men with their naked – knees …?’ (6: 373.28–29). Ballantyne may have been responsible for the change to ‘Cuddalore’ of Guy Mannering’s servant’s ‘Cuddiebum’ in manuscript (2: 66.27), restored in the eewn text, though it could equally well have been a copyist’s or printer’s misreading. It is odd that he apparently did not object to Oldbuck’s ‘Sebaldus Scheyter’ for ‘Sebaldus Schreyer’ in The Antiquary (3: 50.23 (see 25a: 479)). Authorial slyness is also at work in the apparently innocent use of phrases that have sexual innuendoes in the original texts. The seaminess of ‘what Falstaff [in 2 Henry IV] calls the sweet of the night’ in Waverley (1: 50.43–51.1) will be recalled by some readers, and in the same novel ‘the article of their gentry’ (26.4) and ‘the article of Ellangowan’s gentry’ in Guy Mannering (2: 9.41–42) will remind

66 Strategies them that in The Merry Wives of Windsor Mrs Page’s utterances are habitually steeped in sexuality. Traditional songs afford ample opportunity for Authorial nods and winks to certain members of his audience. As the eewn editor notes, ‘Bob of Dumblane’, whistled by the inebriated lieutenant in Chapter 39 of Waverley, ‘can be interpreted in an equivocal way, applying both to marriage celebrations and the sexual act itself’ (1: 200.26, 580). When the eldest Dinmont boy engages to take care of Brown’s dog Wasp in Guy Mannering, giving him ‘A bit of his supper, a bit of his bed’ (2: 141.1–4), some will share Scott’s amusement on recollecting that, in the song ‘I’ll make ye be fain to follow’, the words originally applied to a soldier’s offer to his girl-friend.12 And when Effie sings ‘a scrap of an old Scotch song’ (‘Through the kirk-yard | I met wi’ the Laird’) to tease her sister in The Heart of Mid-Lothian she stops meaningfully before the explicit sexual reference (6: 87.20–30).13 Scott did not rely entirely on James Ballantyne to protect polite sensibilities. In Guy Mannering the Author observes of his representation of the gypsy conversation in Chapter 28: ‘We omit here various execrations with which these honest gentlemen garnished their discourse, retaining only such of their expletives as are least offensive’ (2: 148.19–21), and later in the same novel MacGuffog addresses his wife not only with ‘d – d’ but with ‘two additional epithets of great energy, but which we beg to be excused from repeating’ (263.7–9). Authorial censorship is not infrequently exercised silently, though men of the world may have been aware from time to time that the words of a source had been altered to avoid giving offence to the more prudish. One of Madge Wildfire’s scraps has ‘Oliver’s rinning for fear’ in place of ‘Oliver stinks for fear’ in ‘The Cavalier’s Song’ (6: 149.7); when the song recurs in Woodstock ‘Oliver smokes for fear’ (19: 57.14). Similarly, ‘savour’ replaces ‘stink’ in the quotation from Fletcher’s Love’s Pilgrimage used as the motto to Chapter 11 of The Bride of Lammermoor (7a: 94.31). In Rob Roy Justice Inglewood’s rendering of a Lancashire song taken from a collection by Joseph Ritson is approximate, and the approximation eliminates the explicitly sexual. The original reads: At Skipton in Craven there’s never a haven, Yet many a time foul weather; He that will not lie a fair woman by, I wish he were hang’d in a teather. This appears in the novel as: O, in Skipton-in-Craven, Is never a haven, But many a day foul weather;

Strategies  67 And he that would say A pretty girl nay, I wish for his cravat a tether. (5: 63.14–19) Graham Tulloch has shown that Scott uses archaic words to protect innocent readers from matters sexual, as with ‘cockatrice’ and ‘waistcoateer’ for ‘prostitute’ in Kenilworth (11: 7.22) and The Fortunes of Nigel (13: 191.22, 230.41–42), and ‘bordel’ for ‘brothel’ in Anne of Geierstein (22: 213.38).14 It is sometimes a moot point whether characters using ­sexually-charged allusions are aware of the origins of their utterances. In Guy Mannering Pleyell is fond of literary reference, so presumably he knows that his ‘peer out, peer out’ addressed to Hazelwood (2: 327.24) is from Shakespeare. Whether he remembers that it is recorded by Mrs Page as having been uttered by Ford with reference to his cuckold’s horns is less certain, but it may be an element in his bonding with Hazlewood, or simply for his own amusement. When he asks Mannering ‘Are you avised of that?’ his ‘comic expression of surprise’ may or may not have a small admixture of recollection of the pervasive indecency surrounding the phrase in The Merry Wives of Windsor (234.30–31); but when Cromwell uses ‘peer out, peer out’ in Woodstock it is almost certainly just the expression rather than a Shakespearean allusion (19: 96.26). It may well be the Author’s rather than the character’s decision to abbreviate Oldbuck’s list of alchemical ingredients from The Alchemist in The Antiquary so as to exclude (inter alia) ‘piss’, ‘women’s terms’, and ‘merds’ (3: 194.9–13), and to adjust Clutterbuck’s rendering of ‘a mildly obscene song’, ‘The Fryer and the Nun’ from Wit and Mirth, in the Introductory Epistle of The Fortunes of Nigel (13: 15.5–8). Occasionally Scott (and here Scott it must be) bonds with a very narrow circle of friends and acquaintances. When Godfrey Bertram, in his meanderings, says to Guy Mannering ‘allow me to recommend some of the kipper – It was John Hay that catched it Saturday was three weeks down at the stream below Hempseed ford’ only a handful will share the insight derived by the eewn editor from James C. Corson: ‘also the name of a keen angler, known to Scott, who worked as a pressman for James Ballantyne & Co. He died at Kelso, 29 June 1855, aged seventy-­nine, and was proud of having been mentioned in Guy Mannering’ (2: 29.2–4, 525). The modern reader who chooses to seek out the explanatory note becomes one of a select band indeed!

4 For those who recognise the allusions, one of the most enjoyable features in the Waverley Novels is Scott’s witty turning of the original, whether overtly Authorial or mediated through his characters.

68 Strategies He foregrounds the procedure in the first chapter of The Black Dwarf, where Cleishbotham quotes a couplet from Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd ‘which he right happily transferred from the vice of avarice to that of ebriety’ (4a, 13.34–37). Often a metaphor is restored to the literal sense, or (more rarely) vice versa. When in Guy Mannering Dominie Sampson’s new suit of clothes, cunningly insinuated without his knowledge, ‘“by the aid of use, cleaved to their mould”’ (2: 105.16–17), there is a literalising of Banquo’s observation on Macbeth: ‘New honours come upon him, | Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould | But with the aid of use’.15 In the progress to Kenilworth ‘clowns  … were treading on the kibes of substantial burghers and gentlemen of worship’ (11: 252.12–14), recalling Hamlet’s observation that ‘the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe’. Triptolemus in The Pirate adapts Malvolio’s scornful ‘I am not of your element’ to the distinction between himself as concerned with the earth and Cleveland as a mariner (12: 168.30–32). Hamlet’s insulting reference to Ophelia as ‘metal more attractive’ than his mother is transferred to the money casket which ‘contained matter, or rather metal, so attractive to old Trapbois’ in The Fortunes of Nigel (13: 248.10), and with equal wit Lady Macbeth’s ‘O proper stuff!’ becomes actual material in The Surgeon’s Daughter (20: 180.19). In Woodstock Gracebe-there Humgudgeon’s ‘let these men’s bonds be made strong’ is a grim literalisation of Isaiah’s metaphor (19: 369.10–11); in Peveril of the Peak Bridgenorth deftly converts Paul’s metaphorical ‘sounding brass’ in 1 Corinthians to ‘the sounding of tin and brass tubes amid the aisles of a minster’ (14: 145.15–16); and in The Betrothed Wilkin has an amusingly literal take on Matthew’s ‘all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword’, though whether the wit is his own or a matter for a smile between Author and reader can be debated: ‘Our lord deceased, if deceased he be, was one of those who trusted to the edge of his sword, and even so hath come of it. Commend me to a cross-bow and a well-victualled castle, if I must needs fight at all’ (18a: 44.17–20).16 A transfer in the opposite direction, from literal to metaphorical, can be found in The Talisman, where it is actually noted as such by the Author, introducing a sudden apocalyptic dimension. The hermit Engaddi observes the Emir sleeping: “He sleeps soundly,” said the hermit, in the same low tone as before, and repeating the words, though he had changed the idea from that which is literal to a metaphorical sense, – “He sleeps in darkness, but there shall be for him a day-spring. – O, Ilderim, thy waking thoughts are yet as vain and wild as those which are wheeling their giddy dance through thy sleeping brain; but the trumpet shall be heard, and the dream shall be dissolved.” (18b: 41.29–35)

Strategies  69 Engaddi here invokes both the last trumpet of 2 Corinthians and Peter’s vision in his second epistle of the final dissolution. Another example of such a transfer, less striking and unsignalled, can be found in Chapter 15 of Peveril of the Peak, where the literal ‘likeness of a kingly crown’ on Death’s head in the motto from Paradise Lost is wittily applied to the young Earl of Derby’s disinclination to take seriously his duties as ‘King of Man’, or as he puts it ‘our most absurd Majesty of Man’ (14: 151.7–8, 155.38). Sometimes the wit consists in an incongruity between the original and its application, as when Bradwardine in Waverley applies a phrase from Virgil’s Eclogues to the sentinel who challenges their party – ‘Hylax in limine latrat’ there referring to the betrayal of a lover’s arrival (1: 239.30) – and when Talbot overtly borrows Shallow’s self-deprecatory denigration of his rural seat in 2 Henry IV to characterise Scotland: ‘Barren, barren, beggars all, beggars all’ (279.37–38). There is a consciously virtuoso duet in The Antiquary, as Oldbuck quotes lines from Comus to characterise the complexity of the approach to the ruins of Saint Ruth, following them with an exclamation as his wig is caught on a bramble, and Isabella Wardour chimes in with Lycidas: ‘So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, | And yet anon repairs his drooping head, | And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore | Flames on the forehead’, stopping before ‘of the morning sky’ (3: 129.38–130.8). A different sort of incongruity can be observed a few pages later when in the Martin Waldeck story the sense of a familiar psalm is radically shifted from general overwhelming trouble to moral decline: ‘As Deep calls unto Deep, one bad passion awakened another’ (144.17–18). A curious shift of meaning occurs twice: in both Waverley and Rob Roy the line from the Crispian speech in Henry V ‘Familiar in his mouth as household words’ is used for threatening names of Highlanders or highwaymen (1: 160.16–19; 5: 24.25–28). There are occasions, though, when it is unlikely the reader is expected to make anything of a mismatch between original and application. In Guy Mannering four entirely positive lines from Crabbe’s ‘Edward Shore’ are introduced to indicate the excellence of young Brown’s character (2: 96.9–12). Shore is a freethinker who has a relationship with a married woman and declines into idiocy. Many contemporaneous readers will have recognised the allusion, and perhaps it will have caused some unnecessary apprehensions, but the lines are probably meant to be taken out of context as a classic expression of youthful promise. When Oldbuck in The Antiquary sends Caxon with a message to Sir Arthur Wardour ‘He hobbled – but his heart was good; | Could he go faster than he could?’ (3: 37.5–6). The original first line of the couplet in Charles Churchill’s The Ghost reads ‘Crape hobbled – but his mind was good’, where Crape is a pampered priest. A few knowledgeable readers may

70 Strategies smile at the incongruity, but it is likely that the couplet is simply intended to be part of the entertaining and energising narratological diversity. The wit sometimes consists not in a mismatch, but rather the reverse, a particularly neat correspondence between original and fictional situation. When Bradwardine says of Gellatley in Waverley that ‘the roguish loon must … eat of our bread and drink of our cup’ (1: 58.10–11) the neatness involves an implicit reference to idiocy in the echoing of Proverbs 9.4–5: ‘Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as for him that wanteth understanding, she [Wisdom] saith to him, | Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled’. Later in the same novel there is a similar correspondence as two lines (slightly varied) from Anna Seward’s ‘From thy waves, stormy Lannow, I fly’ are quoted to express Waverley’s feelings at his treatment by Flora: ‘O nymph, unrelenting and cold as thou art, | My bosom is proud as thine own’ (222.22–23). Much of the short poem is relevant, especially lines 4 and 8: ‘Has wreck’d my warm hopes by her pride’ and ‘But away, thou fond dream of my heart’. In The Antiquary Oldbuck fleshes out his assertion that if his library were to come into Hector’s possession his nephew ‘would make it fly to the gunsmith, the horse-market, the dog-breaker’, and adds words from one of Horace’s odes which may be translated ‘to exchange illustrious books, gathered from far and wide, for Spanish armour’ (3: 304.23–25). The phrase (shorn of some Roman specifics) is a neat fit. When Mysie Happer lays a table for Sir Piercie Shafton at the inn in The Monastery Scott finds in Thomas Parnell’s ‘Anacreontick’ a perfect match for one of the cavalier’s conflicting reactions: it was as if some ‘sweet engaging Grace | Put on some clothes to come abroad, | And took a waiter’s place’ (9: 270.22–24).

5 Scott was possessed of an unusually retentive verbal memory. Literary texts in particular were often stored in his head. This was convenient and productive, though his recall was far from word perfect. His attitude to the texts he draws on shows the influence of his editorial work on the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. He was very much at home with the prevailing contemporaneous idea that an editor was free to improve on the version of an orally transmitted text available to him. In a playful footnote referring to the fictitious register of Alsatia in The Fortunes of Nigel he has a sly reference to Joseph Ritson whose concern for the accurate reproduction of traditional texts was very much the exception at the time: This curious register is still in existence, being in possession of that eminent antiquary Dr Dryasdust, who liberally offered the author permission to have the autograph of Duke Hildebrod engraved as an illustration of this passage. Unhappily, being rigorous as Ritson

Strategies  71 himself in adhering to the very letter of his copy, the worthy Doctor clogged his munificence with the condition that we should adopt the Duke’s orthography and entitle the work “The Fortunes of Niggle,” with which stipulation we did not think it necessary to comply. (13: 195.41–46) Given his editorial principles, it is understandable that Scott treated his source texts with what modern editors would regard as licentious freedom. Inclination as well as principle was involved: his creative instinct was seldom in abeyance, and anything that passed through his hands was likely to be changed to a greater or lesser extent. He was also, it has to be said, careless about details. In this study the stress will be on the positive results of his free handling of his sources, but the negative effects of his carelessness will also be noted. It is rare for a passage reproduced in the Waverley Novels to follow the original exactly. (When it does, in the case of a quotation of any length, it is likely to be because Scott instructed an accurate helper to copy directly from the relevant book.) A number of the differences between the original texts and Scott’s version can be regarded as straightforward mistakes, arising from careless transcription or imperfect recollection. Changes involving clear error on Scott’s part are usually of little moment, as when in Waverley Bradwardine ‘on his white horse, like Earl Percy of yore’ in ‘Chevy Chase’ is actually mounted like Douglas (1: 60.26). But most of the variations are not so easily dismissed. Sometimes it can be difficult to know whether deviations from the originals that appear to be simple errors are Authorial or attributable to the character who is speaking. In Waverley there are several slips that possibly cast doubts on the accuracy of Bradwardine’s pedantry: he attributes a sentiment to Livy rather than Tacitus (1: 52.43–53.2), and vice versa (237.26–28); he misattributes a book to the younger Pliny that belongs to the elder, and which does not in any case say what he claims it does (57.29–30); in the same speech (31) he misremembers one of the Psalms; he apparently credits a legal authority of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with a work published a century before, and immediately afterwards confuses the correct and incorrect names of a law referred to by Cicero, whom he later misquotes (212.41–213.1, 320.3–4); and he offers an incorrect derivation of ‘caligæ’ (246.5–6). The number of errors might suggest they are a deliberate part of Scott’s characterisation, but they constitute only a small proportion of the Baron’s many pedantic references. In the same novel the considerable inaccuracy of Talbot’s quotation from Dryden’s The Spanish Friar applied to Calum may be intentional, introduced as it is by ‘he reminds me of lines I have somewhere heard – upon the stage, I think’ (279.8–13): it certainly needs some adaptation to the fictional context, if only to change ‘behind her’ to ‘behind him’. In The Antiquary Ochiltree’s misrecollection of Psalm 12,

72 Strategies concentrating on the image of silver rather than ‘the words of the Lord’ which it symbolises, and having the metal purified three times rather than seven, may well be his error, but it could be Scott’s (3: 196.27–28). Simon of Hackburn’s version of Luke 6.31 in The Black Dwarf (‘Do as you would be done by’), though, is clearly his own: ‘Let women sit and greet at hame, men must do as they have been done by; it’s the Scripture says’t’ (4a: 54.14–15). Almost as clearly attributable to the character, in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, is Dalgetty’s ‘you may read in Scripture, that he that putteth off his armour should not boast himself like he that putteth it on – I believe that is not the right word of command’ (7b: 37.29–31), reversing the original in 1 Kings (‘Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off’). When in Peveril of the Peak ‘Ganlesse’ quotes Chaucer, Peveril, ‘willing to shew himself a man of reading in his turn’, comes up with a reference to ‘old Caius’ in The Merry Wives of Windsor (14: 213.37–40): the correct source is actually Kent in King Lear. It would make excellent narrative sense for this to be Peveril’s slip. If the Author is at fault it is a felix culpa. On one occasion at least Scott has a character acknowledge a mistake. Julia Mannering says in Guy Mannering that Brown has returned ‘after he had been supposed dead, like Aboulfouaris the great voyager to his sister Canzade and his brother Hour in ‘The Adventures of Aboulfouaris’. I am wrong in the story, I believe – Canzade was his wife’. She was indeed in error (2: 315.39–41): since this does not apparently serve any thematic purpose it looks as if Scott is having fun with his own imperfect recollection and headlong method of composition, not bothering to cross out the mistake but making a minor serendipitous point of it. A number of Scott’s quotations show clear deterioration from the originals, usually in the direction of conventionalising, and for these the erratic element in his remarkable memory, and a trace of verbal coarseness, must be held responsible. It is most noticeable in some of the citations of Wordsworth and Coleridge, where their precise and distinctive use of common words is missed. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian ‘fond and wayward thoughts’ becomes ‘strange and wayward thoughts’, influenced no doubt by the first line of Wordsworth’s poem ‘Strange fits of passion have I known’ (6: 239.4). Small words are again changed, probably from memory, in the quotation from ‘The Fountain’ in The Antiquary, where ‘those days’ becomes ‘these days’ and ‘less for what age takes away | Than what it leaves behind’ becomes ‘less for what time takes away, | Than what he leaves behind’ (3: 75.15–22). Coleridge particularly objected to lines from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ being imitated in a speech of Galeotti in Quentin Durward. The original reads: Still as a slave before his lord, The ocean hath no blast; His great bright eye most silently Up to the Moon is cast.

Strategies  73 In the novel this is echoed as: ‘the moon herself … holds yet under her domination … the tides of the mighty ocean itself, which ebb and increase as her disk waxes and wanes, and watch her influences as a slave waits the nod of a Sultana’ (15: 320.13–17). Coleridge noted in a waspish marginal comment: ‘From the Ancient Mariner stolen and (as usual) spoilt in the attempt to disguise the theft’.17 In this case the prose echo is sufficiently different from the original poem to be viable in its own right, and it is difficult to imagine that deliberate disguise was involved. There is certainly imaginative deterioration, though, in the changing of Johnson’s ‘nations on his eye suspended wait’ in The Vanity of Human Wishes to ‘nations on his eyes suspended wait’ in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (7b: 137.3). Sometimes it is the metre of the original that suffers impairment. The substitution in Guy Mannering of ‘around’ for ‘round’ in ‘Guides thee from death? The country’s laid round for thee’ from John Fletcher’s Women Pleased introduces an awkward hypermetrical syllable (2: 237.10). In The Monastery the faulty recollection of Ariosto’s ‘Eran rivali, eran di fe diversi’, from Orlando furioso, as ‘Erano nemici eran’ de fede diversa’ produces a metrically impossible line (9: 290.20). On a couple of occasions Scott’s Chaucer quotations are difficult to read aloud, as in this example from The Antiquary (where, for bad measure, the sense of the third line is mangled): For he would rather have at his bed-head, A twenty books, clothed in black or red, Of Aristotle, or [for ‘and’] his philosophy, Than robes rich, rebeck, or saltery. (3: 23.15–18) There are six editions of Chaucer in the Abbotsford library, two of them restricted to The Canterbury Tales. Since Scott treats Chaucer with his usual freedom it is not always possible to know for certain which text he has in mind, but a collation of the extracts suggests that in most cases he was using as his basis the text shared by Tyrwhitt’s second edition of 1798 and Alexander Chalmers’s The Works of the English Poets (1810). This is so here, in the ‘General Prologue’, but Tyrwhitt and Chalmers have ‘A twenty bookes’: Scott’s modernised spelling means that ‘clothed’ has to be read as two syllables, which is possible but awkward. It may also be observed that these lines do not in fact furnish notable examples of the gutturals to which Oldbuck is said to give ‘the true Anglo-Saxon enunciation, which is now forgotten in the southern parts of this realm’.18 The alterations to Chaucer are one consequence of Scott’s evident desire to make older material more accessible to his general readership. Modernisation of spelling is fairly standard practice. Scott has some amusement at the idea of Waverley adapting Flora’s song, in unspecified ways, for modern (English) taste as the Author comments: ‘I conjecture the following copy to have been somewhat corrected by Waverley, to suit the taste of those who might not relish pure antiquity’ (1: 64.16–18).

74 Strategies In the rendering of William Wager’s The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art in Kenilworth the presumably nonsensical ‘sodledum bell’ becomes ‘Saddle them well’ (11: 80.7). Anglicisation is also widespread. The motto to Chapter 34 of Quentin Durward reads ‘I’ll take thee to the good green wood, | And make thine own hand choose the tree’ (15: 368.5–6). Leyden’s ‘Lord Soulis’, first published in the ­Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, has ‘I would take you to the good greenwood, | And gar your ain hand wale the tree’. Anglicisation is part of a more complex process in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, when ­A lexander Ross’s poem ­Helenore is enlisted for its description of the ‘Highland Arcadia’ of Knocktarlitie. In the original the lines run: The water feckly on a level sled, Wi’ little dinn, but couthy what it made. On ilka side, the trees grew thick and strang, And wi’ the birds they a’ were in a sang: On ev’ry side, a full bow shot and mair, The green was even, gowany, and fair: With easy sklent, on ev’ry hand the braes, To right well up, wi’ scatter’d busses raise: Wi’ goats and sheep aboon, and ky below, The bony braes a’ in a swarm did go. In the novel this appears as: The water gently down a level slid, With little din, but couthy what it made; On ilka side the trees grew thick and lang, And wi’ the wild birds’ notes were a’ in sang; On either side, a full bow-shot and mair, The green was even, gowany, and fair; With easy slope on every hand the braes To the hills’ feet with scattered bushes raise; With goats and sheep aboon, and kye below, The bonnie banks all in a swam did go. (6: 398.2–11) Some of the differences here suggest Scott is quoting from memory: ‘thick and lang’ for ‘thick and strang’ in the third line, all of the fourth line, and ‘either’ for ‘ev’ry’. Others would appear to indicate that at the same time he is eliminating difficulties for many of his readers: ‘gently’ for ‘feckly’, ‘slope’ for ‘sklent’, and ‘bushes’ for ‘busses’ – though he retains ‘couthy’ and ‘gowany’. Yet others seem gratuitous anglicising: ‘With’ for ‘Wi’’, ‘all’ for ‘a’’ (but only once in each case). As for the ‘banks’ for ‘braes’ in the last line, this may be a deliberate or instinctive avoidance of repetition from three lines before.

Strategies  75 The extent to which Scott can recompose when quoting from memory, while retaining the shape and basic sense of the original, may be seen in two stanzas from Love and Loyalty by ‘the ingenious and unhappy Andrew MacDonald’ offered as a translation of the Gaelic song rendered by Annot Lyle in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (7b: 165.10–25). The words altered are here italicised and followed by Scott’s version (the second half of the first stanza has no alterations and is omitted): Wer’t thou, like me, in life’s low vale, With thee how blest, that life lot I’d share; With thee I’d fly as far as wherever gale Could waft, or swelling ocean bounding galley bear. … The pangs this foolish heart may must feel. When hope must shall be for ever gone flown, No fruitless sorrow sullen murmur shall reveal, No selfish murmurs ever own. Nor will I through my life’s weary years As Like a pale drooping mourner rove move, While I can think my secret tears Are not forgot by May wound the heart of him I love. One might argue that Scott’s repetition of ‘murmur … murmurs’ is clumsy, but it could be regarded as rhetorically effective, and the other changes are not obviously either beneficial or harmful. It is a good example of the general tenacity and local fallibility, or inventiveness, of his verbal memory. MacDonald was not a well-known poet, but Scott has no compunctions about recasting the lines of much more familiar authors, or perhaps allowing his memory to do so. On one occasion he manages not only to abbreviate and vary a passage from Collins’s Ode to Fear, but to produce a new stanza form. The original lines read: Ne’er be I found, by thee o’erawed, In that thrice-hallowed eve abroad, When ghosts, as cottage-maids believe, Their pebbled beds permitted leave, And goblins haunt, from fire or fen Or mine or flood, the walks of men! This is reinvented for one of the Monastery mottoes: Ne’er be I found by thee o’er awed, On that thrice hallow’d eve abroad, When goblins haunt from flood and fen, The steps of men. (9: 48.20–23)

76 Strategies A comparable but more complex treatment of three couplets from Barbour’s Brus in Quentin Durward is analysed by the eewn editors thus: ‘The first couplet and the fourth line are essentially Barbour’s, modernised; in Barbour the third line runs “Fredome all solace to man giffis” [Scott has “Freedom the zest to pleasure gives”]; the third couplet is Scott’s own, based on the sense of the rest of the passage in The Brus’ (15: 253.26–31, 549). The result is a punchy epigram. Where very short quotations are varied it is often the rhythm and general sense that survive from the original. In Waverley Scott preserves the rhythm of John Home’s iambic pentameter in Douglas ‘If ancestry can be in ought believ’d’ while changing the words to ‘if grey-haired eld can be in aught believed’ (1: 34.28), and in The Heart of Mid-Lothian ‘Stern to inflict and stubborn to endure’ from Southey’s ‘To A. S. Cottle’ becomes ‘firm to resolve, and stubborn to endure’ (6: 102.7–8). In Guy Mannering ‘blessings on your frosty pow’, from Burns’s ‘John Anderson my Jo’, becomes ‘blessings on his dainty face’ (2: 30.32). ‘Staying no longer question’, from 2 Henry IV, becomes ‘tarrying no farther question’ in the same novel (43.5) and ‘staying no further question’ in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (7b: 91.3 – it is reproduced exactly in The ­Antiquary (3: 117.19–20)). Sometimes Scott takes a hint from a source and expands on it. In Waverley he adopts the ‘Lillibulero’ refrain and apparently composes his own lines alternating with it (1: 218.28–35). In The Antiquary a line in the manuscript papers of Robert Mylne that Scott was working on, ‘Earth has the nut and heaven the kernel’, is given a Middle Scots spelling and embodied in a set of three couplets to make up a sepulchral inscription (3: 88.6–11). Later in the same novel a memorable line from an old song, ‘The oysters are a gentle kin’ is developed into a haunting quatrain for Elspeth to sing (310.19–22).19 In Kenilworth a couplet from Samuel Rowlands’s The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head Vaine is expanded into a spirited two-stanza song (11: 12.1–18). Eveline in The Betrothed is haunted by the couplet ‘Widow’d wife and married maid, | Betroth’d, betrayer, and betray’d!’: this is essentially Scott’s composition, but the first line echoes William Combe’s ‘The Wedding’, ‘A widow’d Bride, a married Maid’ (18a: 129.23–24). A number of Scott’s changes are evidently made to adapt the quotation to the fictional context. This may be indicated by putting the new words in quotation marks, or by italicising them: the ‘Welshman’ Fluellen from Henry V becomes the ‘“Scotchman”’ Bradwardine in Waverley (1: 237.40); ‘nine good sons’ in ‘The Rising of the North’ become ‘“six” good sons’ to match the Osbaldistones in Rob Roy (5: 316.13); and in The Antiquary Hector MacIntyre responds to his sister’s ‘Dear Hector, if you really continue to nourish any affection for Miss Wardour’ with ‘If, Mary? – what an if was there!’, alluding to Mark Antony’s ‘O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!’ in Julius Caesar (3: 150.42). In the same novel

Strategies  77 one may compare Oldbuck’s open alteration of the gender in a quotation from one of Horace’s odes applied to the nun Teresa (354.10–11). (Earlier, he has recognised that ‘dumosa’ (bushy), from Virgil’s Eclogues is not applicable to the Scottish cliffs, though he does not offer an alternative word (66.22–23).) Most often, though, the alteration is made silently. In Woodstock Henry Lee’s adaptation of Richard II to express his resignation before Cromwell’s explosive entry into the Lodge, with ‘Go I to death’ for Mowbray’s ‘Go I to fight’, is hardly likely to have been appreciated by his main interlocutor, the unsophisticated Phœbe, but some readers will appreciate the knight’s self-comforting wit (19: 376.10–11). The same is probably true of Charles’s very approximate version of a song derived from ‘Patrick Carey’s jovial farewell’, with a clearly deliberate substitution of ‘Woodstock’ for ‘Wickham’ which neither of his hearers (Dr Rochecliffe and Alice) is likely to have spotted: in this case few readers will be in the secret either (344.39–345.8). More will recognise the substitution of ‘Scotland’ for ‘England’ in ‘Woe, woe for Scotland, not a whit for me!’, adapted from Richard III for Baillie Macwheeble’s distress at the transfer of funds furth of Scotland in Waverley (1: 29.23). When the Author enlists Thomas Warton’s English ‘Ode on the Approach of Summer’ to suggest the rural ease of Croftangry’s Glentannar in Chronicles of the Canongate, ‘many a beech and brown oak’ becomes ‘many a birch and brown oak’ to suit the Scottish scene (20: 36.20), and in Peveril of the Peak the same author’s ‘Oh, trifling head, and fickle heart!’ in ‘The Progress of Discontent’ is radically altered to ‘Ah! Changeful tread, and fickle heart!’ to match Buckingham’s actions in Chapter 39 (14: 395.32). There is a particularly neat adaptation to context in The Antiquary where Oldbuck’s ancestors ‘had “sought the base fellowship of paltry burghers”’ (3: 39.8–9). The phrase is taken from Joanna Baillie’s Orra, which has ‘Seeks the base fellowship of restless burghers’: ‘restless’ is irrelevant to the fictional context, but on this occasion Scott has not just supplied the replacement, he has taken it from Baillie’s ‘paltry Banneret’ two lines earlier in the play. Adaptations to the fictional context sometimes go beyond what is strictly necessary. In The Abbot the motto to Chapter 27 introducing the rustic games is taken without alteration from William Somervile’s Hobbinol, or the Rural Games (10: 249.5–10). The motto to the previous chapter (240.18–22) is from the same source, but it is abbreviated and varied, eliminating the irrelevant prize borne on the standard, but radically recasting in the process. The original reads (after the unchanged first line and a half): See! there on high The glitt’ring Prize, on the tall Standard born, Waving in Air; before him march in Files The rural Minstrilsy, the rattling Drum Of solemn Sound, and th’ animating Horn.

78 Strategies The motto to Chapter 26 has this version: ‘before him march | The rural minstrelsy, the rattling drum, | The clamorous war-pipe, and far-echoing horn’. Another example of changes beyond those required by the context can be found in Peveril of the Peak (14: 406.8–17), where Zarah sings a variant of lines from William Walsh’s ‘The Despairing Lover’. To make grammatical sense as it stands in the original, there would have to have been a further eight lines. Scott avoids this by altering the fifth and sixth lines from ‘His torments projecting, | And sadly reflecting’ to ‘Though his suit was rejected, | He sadly reflected’; but he also changes the first line from ‘When in rage he came there’ to ‘But when he came near’, with less obvious reason. Similarly, Charles’s (anachronistic) quotation of Addison’s translation of Martial in the Spectator a few pages later is adapted to the context in the second line but more gratuitously varied in the first (Scott is probably relying on his memory), so that we have ‘With every symptom of a knave complete, | If he be honest he’s a devilish cheat’ for Addison’s ‘With all these Tokens of a Knave compleat, | Should’st thou be honest, thou’rt a dev’lish Cheat’ (414.7–8). Some of the most intriguing of Scott’s textual allusions are those involving more than one source. Oldbuck’s praise of ancient heroes ‘Stern to resolve, and stubborn to endure, | Who smiled in death’ (3: 243.1–2) is basically from Southey, as noted above, but Southey has ‘That laughed in death’: ‘Who smiled in death’ comes from Thomson’s ‘Summer’. The substitution is probably inadvertent in this case. To convey the high reputation of Lyly the Euphuist, Scott fuses in The Monastery passages from two separate parts of Edward Blount’s edition of his works published in 1632 (9: 134.21–24). Bradwardine ascribes the translation of lines from Virgil’s Aeneid that ends Chapter 43 of Waverley to the Jacobite poet William Hamilton of Bangour, but it appears to be Scott’s own Scots version based on Dryden’s translation with additional input from Othello (1: 225.1–4). In Peveril of the Peak the anti-Cavalier song overheard by Peveril on his return to Derbyshire is also Scott’s composition, but he is adapting lines from Thomas Jordan’s ‘The Answer’ and adding a popular refrain (14: 236.17–24). Later in the novel Empson quotes a couplet by ‘Master Waller’: ‘What know we of the blest above, | But that they sing and that they love’. The lines are indeed based on Waller, but they are quoted as adapted by Wordsworth in ‘Scene on the Lake of Brientz’ (319.8–10). At the beginning of Chapter 7 of The Heart of Mid-Lothian the Author says of the reprieved and unsuspecting Porteous: ‘his heart was merry within him, and he thought, in the emphatic words of Scripture on a similar occasion, that surely the bitterness of death was past’ (6: 56.17–19). The ‘bitterness of death’ is used twice later in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, once of Jeanie’s recovery from the fear that Robertson is about to murder her, and once by Effie after a painful interruption to her trial (139.35, 212.19). 20 It is also employed several times in other novels, 21 but the application to Porteous is closest to the

Strategies  79 original context, where Agag is killed in the next verse. Scott increases its effect here by preceding it with an unsignalled reference to the story told later in 1 Samuel where the churlish Nabal dies two verses after his heart had been ‘merry within him, for he was very drunken’, as Porteous is ‘hot with wine’ (56.38).

6 This chapter has explored four of Scott’s dominant strategies: his ways of handling degrees of reader ignorance; his establishing of bondings between characters, Author, and readers; his conspicuous displays of wit; and his varied alterations of his textual sources. There remain to be noted a number of more limited intertextual procedures. Several allusions are likely to have been familiar to contemporaneous readers not only from the original sources, but also (or in some cases perhaps, rather) from more recent usages. Duncan Macwheeble’s ‘capacious mouth’ in Waverley is on the face of it an unremarkable expression, but Scott’s readers may well have detected resonances not only from Polyphemus in Gay’s Acis and Galatea (particularly well known because it was set by Handel), but also from Anna Seward’s witty application of it to Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s Life (1: 330.12–13). The Gay allusion is unsignalled, but in Guy Mannering when Brown ‘whistled as he went along, not “from want of thought,” but to give vent to those buoyant feelings which he had no other mode of expressing’ (2: 118.7–8), readers were encouraged by the quotation marks to remember Dryden’s Cymon and Iphigenia where Cymon ‘trudged along, unknowing what he sought, | And whistled as he went, for want of thought’; they will also very likely have recalled Steele’s reference to it in the Spectator. In either case, or in both, the result will have been a recognition of a classic expression of a particular state of mind. When Oldbuck in The Antiquary quotes a Latin phrase from an Eclogue by Joannes Baptista Spagnolo (he immediately translates it (3: 86.7–8)) few will have been familiar with the original occurrence, but more will probably have remembered Dr Johnson’s delight at tracking down the source of a well-known saying, recorded by Boswell under 30 March 1783. Johnson is involved again in Ivanhoe, when ‘Isaac, like the enriched traveller of Juvenal’s tenth satire, had ever the fear of robbery before his eyes’ (8: 239.26–27): the phrasing recalls his imitation The Vanity of Human Wishes, where the ‘needy Traveller’ can be made apprehensive of robbery if one should ‘Encrease his Riches and his Peace destroy’. And when the town-clerk in The Pirate says that ‘it is as weel … just to do as the collier did when he met the devil’ some readers will have remembered the Elizabethan play Grim, the Collier of Croydon, but others are more likely to have recalled the occurrence of the expression in Fielding’s Tom Jones (12: 321.24–25).

80 Strategies Occasionally, it seems Scott is enjoying the effect of an allusion to an obscure source without expecting many, if indeed any, of his readers to follow him, at least without prompting. C. M. Jackson-Houlston has observed that his ‘resources of memory were wider and deeper than those of many of his audience. Consequently, both the playful, and, on occasion, the serious, implications of his allusion were not always fully available to that audience. … Scott is not only the addresser of the text but, as all writers must be, also its first and most significant addressee’. 22 The fifth chapter of Peveril of the Peak is headed with a stanza adapted from William Stewart Rose’s ‘Edward the Martyr’ featuring a ‘she-captain’, ‘miracle of woman-kind’, who leads the defence of her castle. Readers may link this with the reference in the chapter to the Countess of Derby defending Lathom House (14: 47.30–36, 54.19–25). Few will know, as Scott certainly did, that Rose’s reference is to the defence by Lady Brookes of Corfe Castle, also against the Parliamentary forces (though in that case the castle surrendered and was degraded). When an obscure publication is foregrounded there is a sense that he is inviting his readers to share a private discovery. The most fully developed example can be found at the beginning of Chapter 19 of Waverley, where the Author cites an amusing complaint about an unreliable goose quill from ‘one of the most rare books of Spanish literature’, attributed to the seventeenth-century Francisco López de Ubeda: there is an Italian translation at Abbotsford (1: 97.13–24). A more teasing instance can be found in The Fortunes of Nigel when the hero enters the Tower of London as prisoner: a familiar motto on the building from Gray’s The Bard is followed by the comment ‘Such is the exclamation of Gray. Bandello, long before him, has said something like it’. The eewn editor has done the necessary research and located the relevant statement in Matteo Bandello’s Novella 34 (13: 311.30–34, 627): Scott will have found the reference in the sixteenth-century collection of Bandello’s stories in his library. Still more teasing, perhaps, is the reference in The Antiquary to ‘what Harlequin calls l’embarras des richesses’, where not many contemporaneous readers will have been able to join in Scott’s pleasure as he alludes to the problems faced by Arlequin when he is given a fortune by Plutus in the 1725 play L’Embarras des richesses by Léonor-Jean-Christine Soulas d’Allainval (3: 84.42). Misleading ascriptions abound, especially with mottoes, as we shall see in the next chapter, but also more widely. Adam Woodcock’s ‘jolly old song’ in The Abbot is very likely by Scott himself (10: 57.1–6). Contrary to what is asserted in a footnote in the same novel, Thomas Hope’s novel Anastasius does not contain ‘burlesque ceremonies … in the Greek Church’ (106.42–43). In Peveril of the Peak a genuine reference to Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler is followed on the next page by a misleading one (14: 112.17–18, 113.7–8). The phrase ‘then there will be a pair of you’ ascribed by a gambler in The Surgeon’s Daughter to Pugg, a character in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, has not been found

Strategies  81 there, or elsewhere (20: 213.35–36). In casual mood, the Author in The Fair Maid of Perth refers to ‘what the poet Gray, or some one else, has termed, Beauty lying in the lap of Terror’: the closest match located is actually in William Gilpin’s Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (21: 11.28–29). It is impossible to tell whether Scott’s sending enquirers on such wild-goose chases is deliberate or inadvertent. From time to time Scott uses quotations and allusions to help with narrative descriptions, or in place of them. A couplet from ‘The Old and Young Courtier’ in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry is enlisted in Waverley for the banquet scene at Tully-Veolan: ‘In an old hall hung round with pikes and with bows, | With old bucklers and corslets that had borne many shrewd blows’ (1: 46.17–18). Some readers will recall that the couplet is part of a characterisation of a courtier who is in love with everything old. The convalescent Waverley’s resumption of his travels is covered by an anglicised version of two lines from one of Scott’s favourite poems, Elizabeth Wardlaw’s Hardyknute: ‘And he has ridden o’er moor and moss, | O’er hill and many a glen’ (127.34–35). When Talbot is preparing to embark at Leith, it is Burns’s ‘My bony Mary’ that sketches in the scene: ‘The boat rock’d at the pier of Leith, | Full loud the wind blew down the ferry; | The shop rode at the Berwick Law’ (279.41–43). In The Monastery a stanza from the ballad ‘Gil Morrice’ suggests that the vigour of Halbert’s escape from Avenel Castle persists on the rest of his journey to meet up with the Earl of Moray: And when he came to broken briggs, He slack’d his bow and swam; And when he came to grass growing, Set down his feet and ran. (9: 317.6–9) We are now in a position to narrow the focus further, as we turn to consider the most striking, and possibly the most rewarding, of all the areas where Scott alludes to other texts, the chapter mottoes.

Notes 1 ‘No instance could more effectively illustrate the vitalizing power of Scott’s charm and lively fancy than this ingenious metaphor’: Christabel F. Fiske, Epic Suggestion in the Imagery of the Waverley Novels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 77. 2 Many of the early reviewers complained about the problem English readers faced when confronted by extensive Scots dialogue (J. W. Croker in the Quarterly opining that Guy Mannering ‘would be on the whole improved, by being translated into English’ (Quarterly Review, 12 (January 1815), 501–09 (508)), though some at least recognised that it was more of an asset than a hindrance. Dealing with the same novel the Monthly Review noted: ‘The fastidious will probably object to the unsparing use of the Scottish dialect: but, though sometimes put to a stand by the terms of a phraseology so unusual to us, we can willingly pardon even this inconvenience for the sake

82 Strategies of the additional reality which it bestows on the representation before us’ (n. s. 77 (May 1815), 85–94 (93)). 3 Alison Lumsden, Walter Scott and the Limits of Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 3. 4 Tulloch, 117–28 (126), 259–66. Tulloch also has a very fine analysis, concentrated in his final chapter, of the immensely complex relationship between English and Scots in the speeches of the different characters, indicating not only the linguistic distinction between characters but the shifting registers employed by many of the individual characters. 5 Journal, 214. 6 (Baldwin’s) London Magazine, n. s. 2 (August 1825), 593–99 (595–96). 7 A similar dissatisfaction finds voice in the review of The Fortunes of Nigel by the Gazette of Fashion: ‘We … recommend such of our readers as are desirous to see the method of manufacturing modern novels, to look at their good leisure over old Tom Shadwell’s play of the Squires of Alsatia, Decker’s Honest Whore, Cartwright’s Ordinary, Miss Aikin’s book on the Court of James I., where they will find the whole of the secret developed. Nay, they will find that the author of Nigel has not done justice to the materials, but that he has done as the gipseys do, who, when they steal children, mutilate them so that their own parents could not know them again’ (6 (June 1822), 85–86 (86)). 8 Scotsman, 26 June 1819, 207. 9 See e.g. 3: 17.11–12, 26.21–22, 30.9–13, 33.23–25, 42.17–24, 103.31–37, 106.5–6, 107.16. 10 See e.g. 3: 147.7–8, 245.3–42, 297.15. 11 See John J. Burke, Jr, ‘The Homoerotic Subtext in Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel: The Question of Evidence’, Clio, 29 (2000), 295–314. 12 Compare the use of a substantially altered song with sexual implications as motto to the entirely non-sexual Chapter 23 of Rob Roy (5: 183.2–10). 13 For this example, see the fullest and finest treatment of Scott’s varied uses of folk song in the novels: C. M. Jackson-Houlston, Ballads, Songs and Snatches: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-­ century Realist Prose (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), Ch. 2 (13–50, esp. 44). 14 Tulloch, 126–28. 15 The same allusion is employed without any shift in sense, and with entire seriousness, for the Bittlebrains in The Bride of Lammermoor (7a: 142.41–143.2). 16 For further examples of turnings from the metaphorical to the literal see 1: 252.24–25; 2: 33.8; 3: 34.13; 12: 302.35–36; 17: 250.32. 17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, 6 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980–2001), 4, ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley (1998), 614. 18 Even in the curious advocacy of Chaucer by Ganlesse (Edward Christian) in Peveril of the Peak there is a metrically defective line: ‘Now with his love – now in his cold grave’ (14: 213.26). 19 For a perceptive discussion of this expansion see C. M. Jackson-Houlston, ‘“Scoundrel minstrels”: Some Allusions to Song in Two Scott Novels’, in Carnival, 97–109 (103). 20 See the eewn note to 6: 212.19 at 671, and the article by Claire Lamont cited there. 21 See The Tale of Old Mortality (4b: 264.19); Rob Roy (5: 262.36); Quentin Durward (15: 349.20–21); Anne of Geierstein (22: 21.3). 22 C. M. Jackson-Houlston, ‘“Scoundrel Minstrels”: Some Allusions to Song in Two Scott Novels’, in Carnival, 97–109 (98).

5 Mottoes

1 Scott was not the first novelist to adopt the practice of prefacing chapters with epigraphs, usually called mottoes following his own usage.1 (The terms are here used interchangeably to minimise turgidity.) But after Waverley he made the procedure very much his own, employing it with seemingly inexhaustible variety to the great enrichment of his narratives. Most of the chapters in his first novel have titles rather than mottoes. They are generally routine, but that to Chapter 30 has a distinctly Fieldingesque ring to it (‘Shows that the loss of horse’s shoe may be a serious inconvenience’ (1: 158.35–36)), and that to Chapter 58 is allusive in motto mode (‘The confusion of King Agramant’s camp’: 285.9). Chapter 54 actually has for its title a quotation from Much Ado about Nothing (‘“To one thing constant never”’: 270.24), but it is not until Chapter 66 that a motto appears in place of, rather than as, a title (330.2–3). There are epigraphs for the following three chapters, then a title for Chapter 70 (‘Dulce Domum’: 351.27), an epigraph again for Chapter 71 (355.7–8), and a quirky title for the final chapter (‘A Postscript, which should have been a preface’: 362.30). In Guy Mannering mottoes are universal, but the first three (unlike those in Waverley, which all appear in their present place on the recto of the manuscript) were added after the initial composition, 2 suggesting it took a little time for Scott to adopt the practice as his norm. Thereafter most of the novels have a motto (very occasionally there are two) for every chapter. In Quentin Durward chapter titles are reinstated, but alongside epigraphs: this was apparently a security measure to prevent piracy by not having the novel’s title in the running heads (15: 405). The chapter titles are no longer Fieldingesque but baldly efficient, matching the tone of the work. This procedure was continued in Saint Ronan’s Well, but in Redgauntlet the epistolary and journal mode of the first half of the novel made mottoes inappropriate, and Scott did not introduce them when he shifted to third-person narrative.3 The experience of writing this novel perhaps led him to regard mottoes as more of a liability than an asset when he moved on to The Betrothed where not every chapter has one:  when James Ballantyne asked in proof for a motto, Scott

84 Mottoes responded, ‘There is no absolute reason for having mottoes to each chapter’ and didn’t oblige (18a: 302–03). Working on ‘The Highland Widow’ for Chronicles of the Canongate he told Robert Cadell he was ‘uncertain whether to have mottoes to the Chapters or no’ and asked if he thought it ‘of consequence’ (20: 319): all four chapters of ‘The Highland Widow’ have epigraphs, but several of those in The Surgeon’s Daughter do not. The eewn editor reasonably suggests that this ‘seems to show a certain amount of detachment from the work in its late stages, on the part of both author and publisher’. ‘Scott himself was, at this period, uninterested in the motto as a literary device, for he wrote in his Journal for 24 March 1826: “It is foolish to encourage people to expect mottoes and such like Decoraments. You have no credit for success in finding them and there is a disgrace in wanting them”’ (320). There is evidence that the epigraphs were popular with Scott’s first readers. The Rev. Thomas McCrie’s anonymous review of the first series of Tales of my Landlord for the Edinburgh Christian Instructor is best known for its attack on Scott’s alleged denigration of the Covenanters, but it includes an assertion by a friend that the mottoes have ‘contributed as much as any thing to the popularity of the Tales’. The friend continues: Ask the publisher, and I am persuaded he will tell you, that the uniform practice of purchasers, on taking up the book, is to look at the title page and beginning of the chapters, and upon perceiving the poetical impress on these, they at once draw the conclusion, and throw down the money. I can assure you that it forms one of their leading beauties, and exhibits, in fact, that ‘variety combined with unity,’ which you insinuated was awanting in them. It has a most wonderful effect upon the mind of the reader – an effect which may be compared to that of the chorus in the ancient Greek tragedy, or of a song between the acts of a modern comedy, or of the tuck of the drum during the intervals of evolution at a military review, or the sound of the huntsman’s horn upon the dogs at a fox-chace, or, not to multiply figures on a topic so evident, and to comprehend all in one, like the effect of the stroke of an auctioneer’s hammer at the end of every article of sale.4 The list of authors supplying chapter mottoes is dominated by Shakespeare, totally outdistancing his nearest rivals with 210 items. The rest of the field is headed by Fletcher, either on his own or as joint author (twenty), followed by Crabbe (nineteen), Dryden (eighteen), Pope (sixteen), Jonson, Coleridge, and Joanna Baillie (twelve each), Burns (eleven), Milton (ten), Butler, Gay, Byron, and Campbell (nine each), Spenser and Wordsworth (eight each), Johnson (seven), and Mickle (six). Many other authors appear on five occasions or fewer. In addition

Mottoes  85 there are nearly fifty mottoes drawn from traditional sources, including Percy’s Reliques and the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. With The Antiquary Scott began to include some epigraphs of his own devising, though that to Chapter 17 of Guy Mannering, extending the light tone of its counterpart from The Beggar’s Opera in the preceding chapter to apply to Authorial procedures, may already be his (2: 91.9–12). 5 All but four of the mottoes to the final volume of The Antiquary are of his composing, and with two exceptions they are ascribed to ‘Old Play’, which becomes his favourite method of designating original mottoes, reflecting the predominant old drama style. By the end of the series he had composed more than 250. He explains what made him adopt this practice (or what he remembers as having done so) in the signed Introduction to Chronicles of the Canongate: The scraps of poetry which have been in most cases tacked to the beginning of chapters in these Novels, are sometimes quoted either from reading or from memory, but, in the general case, are pure invention. I found it too troublesome to turn to the collection of the British Poets to discover apposite mottos, and, in the situation of the theatrical mechanist, who, when the white paper which represented his shower of snow was exhausted, continued the storm by snowing brown, I drew on my memory as long as I could, and, when that failed, eked it out with invention. I believe that, in some cases, where actual names are affixed to the supposed quotations, it would be to little purpose to seek them in the works of the authors referred to. (20: 9.12–22) The present discussion is primarily concerned with epigraphs drawn from texts known to Scott, but those from his own pen will receive some attention at the end.6 In sections 2 to 4, when mottoes are not present in the main manuscript recto text the fact is noted: usually they were inserted by Scott on the facing verso, or they were provided at proof stage.

2 Some of the mottoes are one-dimensional, their main tendency being to generalise the action of the ensuing chapter, almost as if they were proverbs. There is a trio of such straightforward epigraphs in Chapters 24 to 26 of Guy Mannering, taken from John Armstrong’s Art of Preserving Health, Thomson’s Seasons, and the ballad ‘Johnnie Armstrong’ respectively (2: 128.21–25, 132.6–11, 136.9–11, the last supplied at proof stage). These suit the pastoral simplicity of the Liddesdale scenes well, but not all one-dimensional mottoes are as successful. The line from Macbeth (‘Fly, Fleance, fly! – Thou mayst

86 Mottoes escape’) for Chapter 38 of The Pirate (12: 353.13–14) is an unimaginative introduction to Norna’s urging Cleveland to leave the northern isles, and that from Romeo and Juliet (‘O! then I see queen Mab has been with you’) is a rather too predictable preface to the discussion of De Lacy’s dreams in the first paragraph of Chapter 21 of The Betrothed (18a: 177.24–25). Scott inserted both of them in proof, in mechanical mode. Perhaps he would not have defended these routine choices if James Ballantyne had been disposed to query them, as he did on one occasion when George Huntly Gordon, Scott’s faithful assistant, copying the manuscript for the press, was rash enough to suggest a motto to fill a gap at the beginning of Chapter 31 of The Fortunes of Nigel. The chapter opens with Richie Moniplies’s return to Nigel’s service, and Gordon came up with Adam’s plea to be allowed to follow Orlando at the end of Act 2 Scene 3 of As You Like It. Ballantyne commented on the proofs ‘It is applicable, but surely reads common-place’. Scott responded ‘I wish Gordon would not trouble himself with more than transcription’, and provided one of his own ‘Old Play’ compositions on a paper apart, almost defiantly oblique in its relation to Richie’s situation: Marry come up, sir, with your gentle blood! There’s a red stream beneath this coarse blue doublet, That warms the heart as kindly as if drawn From the far source of old Assyrian kings, Who first made mankind subject to their sway. (13: 345.2–6, 422) The connection between epigraph and chapter is sometimes one of general atmosphere rather than specific situation. In Chapter 37 of Kenilworth the guilty and distracted Leicester does not actually break ‘the good meeting | With most admired disorder’ as Macbeth does, but like the Scot he is a host who has concerns other than hospitality to his royal guest on his mind (11: 342.2–4): the following chapter has for its motto Macbeth’s ‘How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?’ continuing the hypersensitive atmosphere effectively (352.10–11). The uncertainties and vague threats of Chapter 21 in Peveril of the Peak are heralded by the opening lines of the Prologue to Otway’s Venice ­Preserved: ‘In these distracted times, when each man dreads | The bloody stratagems of busy heads’ (14: 210.2–3).7 A quotation from The Merchant of Venice heading Chapter 3 of Castle Dangerous helps to establish not only the dismal setting of the chapter but the tone of the whole work (23b: 24.19–21): This night, methinks, is but the daylight sick, It looks a little paler; ’tis a day Such as the day is when the sun is hid.

Mottoes  87 Some epigraphs will be (or will originally have been) particularly r­ esonant for readers familiar with their sources. Consider, for instance, that to the first chapter of The Tale of Old Mortality: Why seeks he with unwearied toil Through death’s dim walks to urge his way; Reclaim his long-asserted spoil? And lead oblivion into day? (4b: 5.6–9) This is taken from John Langhorne’s ‘The Wall-Flower’. The eewn editor notes: ‘The motto is appropriate to Peter Pattieson and his tales, for in “The Wall-Flower” the person who seeks “through death’s dim walks to urge his way” is a “letter’d sage” who explores “the o’ergrown paths of time”’ (436). In addition, the reader familiar with Langhorne will detect (or will originally have detected) a resonance with Old Mortality and his sculptural occupation, for the two stanzas preceding that used for the epigraph read: ’Tis Nature pleading in the breast, Fair memory of her works to find; And when to fate she yields the rest, She claims the monumental mind. Why, else, the o’ergrown paths of time Would thus the letter’d sage explore, With pain these crumbling ruins climb, And on the doubtful sculpture pore? The motto to Chapter 4 of Rob Roy is another resonant case in point (5: 28.8–12). The reader acquainted with Churchill’s anti-Scots satire The Prophecy of Famine may remember that it is ‘inscribed to John Wilkes, Esq.’. A quasi-editorial footnote added to Frank’s discussion of attitudes to the Scots (‘This seems to have been written about the time of Wilkes and Liberty’: 32.43) will then recall the close association of poet and radical. Again, the motto to Chapter 3 of The Abbot prepares for Halbert’s homecoming with a parallel at ‘dead of night’ rather than under the October sun (10: 20.5–9: Scott has several verbal variants), but its source, Leyden’s Scenes of Infancy Descriptive of Teviotdale, must have been an inspiration for these opening chapters: Mary Scott, the Flower of Yarrow, looks out of the window for her returning lover’s plume and finds an infant among a heap of the spoil brought back to the castle, the boy becoming her foster child. Scott usually leaves his readers to determine for themselves the extent of the parallels between epigraphs and text. In the process they may well have to discount prominent aspects of sources familiar to them. The motto introducing Chapter 32 of The Antiquary (3: 253.19–24) is from

88 Mottoes Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother, a lurid play in which Edmund has an incestuous relationship with his mother, and in due course with the result of their union, his daughter and sister. The chapter prepares for Elspeth’s story where the theme of (alleged) incest is also central. But when Edmund’s speech on his return to his ancestral seat is quoted to parallel Bertram’s arrival at Ellangowan in Chapter 41 of Guy Mannering (2: 243.24–30, a verso insertion) incest is not involved, so that the expression ‘Shame-stricken’ in the motto has to be passed over by those who recall Walpole’s play. Some will choose to ignore the mottoes. That is their right, and usually epigraphs are not explicitly linked with the main text. But there are exceptions where the reader is explicitly reminded of their existence.8 The most prominent example is probably that to Chapter 6 of The Talisman, where the transition to Richard’s camp is, unusually, signalled by two mottoes. The first, by Scott, is ascribed, as so often,  to ‘Old Play’ (‘Now change the scene – and let the trumpets sound, | For we must rouse the lion from his lair’); the second is the showman’s adjuration at the Exeter Exchange (‘Walk in, Ladies and Gentlemen’). These are immediately followed by the Authorial ‘The scene must change, as our program [public notice] has announced, from the mountain wilderness of Jordan to the camp of King Richard of England’ (18b: 54.20–27). At the end of Chapter 13 of Guy Mannering Godfrey Bertram dies after rebuking the usurper Glossin, and the epigraph to the following chapter recognises this darkening of tone by drawing on Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. This leads into a gnomic passage beginning with a degree of distancing (‘The moral, which the poet has rather quaintly deduced from the necessary mode of measuring time’) before the quotation in the motto is completed with entire seriousness in the text (2: 78.2–17). A central motif of The Antiquary, the relationship between the elderly Oldbuck and the young Lovel, is emphasised and deepened by Falstaff’s expression in 1 Henry IV of his love for Hal in the motto to Chapter 16 (3: 119.5–9), and shortly into the chapter Oldbuck mutters ‘the words of Falstaff, which we have chosen for the motto of this chapter; for the Antiquary was himself rather surprised at the degree of attachment which he could not but acknowledge he entertained for this stranger’ (120.9–12). Less prominent references back to epigraphs can be found in Chapters 2 and 26 of Guy Mannering.9 Those who come back for a second or subsequent reading of a novel are particularly likely to give appropriate consideration to the mottoes as they will be reading more for art than plot. They may now be paying attention to many of them for the first time, and they will inevitably often find that those they did notice on their initial reading not only appear richer but call for different readings in the light of what the returning reader knows is to come.10

Mottoes  89

3 Most of the epigraphs discussed so far have referred to their chapter as a whole, following the pattern of those introduced at the end of Waverley. That is the norm. But often the link is with a specific part or parts of the chapter, and sometimes the applicability goes beyond the chapter the motto heads. Frequently an epigraph refers primarily or exclusively to the opening of its chapter. That to Chapter 11 of Guy Mannering, inserted at proof stage, is spoken by Time, as Chorus, in The Winter’s Tale to indicate the passage of sixteen years. It is taken up immediately: ‘Our narrative is now about to make a large stride, and omit a space of nearly seventeen years’ (2: 59.16–26). The emphasis on the passing of time reinforces both the element of quasi-astrological prediction and the parallels and contrasts between Shakespeare’s play and the novel.11 The corresponding passage of a period of years between Chapters 36 and 37 of The Tale of Old Mortality is indicated by ‘Whom does time gallop withal?’ from As You Like It, added at proof stage (4b: 286.2–3), and that between Chapters 9 and 10 of Peveril of the Peak by Cleopatra’s ‘Give me to drink mandragora, | That I may sleep away this gap of time’ (14: 98.32–33) – both again taken up immediately in the text. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian the motto from Fergusson’s ‘The Daft-Days’, a verso insertion, sets the tone for the paragraphs on the City Guard beginning the third chapter, and in those paragraphs his own experience of the force is introduced with quotations from two more of his poems (6: 26.20–27.33). It is not uncommon for an epigraph to refer forward to the middle or end of its chapter. Scott ensures that even the reader who has skipped the sentence from the bogus letter to Malvolio in Twelfth Night that forms the motto to Chapter 20 of Quentin Durward (a verso insertion) cannot miss the quizzical linking of Quentin’s romantic and social aspirations with those of Shakespeare’s steward three pages later (15: 217.7–10, 220.14–20); there is indeed a further, unsignalled, reference to Malvolio with ‘daylight and champain’ (221.20). In Chapter 10 of Ivanhoe Isaac’s expressions of outrage at Prince John’s depriving him of fifty zecchins is anticipated by the epigraph from The Jew of Malta three pages before (8: 96.38–39, 93.20–26).12 Frank’s feeling when Helen MacGregor announces he will never see Die again at the end of Chapter 35 of Rob Roy is adumbrated by Basil’s despair at the prospect of losing Victoria in Joanna Baillie’s Count Basil, though the situations are otherwise dissimilar (5: 308.39–309.11, 299.2–7). Another Baillie play, Orra, sets the atmosphere for Cedric’s lamenting of Saxon decline at the end of Chapter 21 of Ivanhoe (8: 171.20–27), a motto drawn from the same act having already helped to establish the castle setting for Chapter 19 (159.11–16).13

90 Mottoes Some mottoes can be taken as referring to more than one element in their chapters. Hamlet’s ‘It is not madness’ heading Chapter 47 of Guy Mannering (inserted at proof stage) is clearly echoed by Meg Merrilees’s ‘I am not mad!’ in the middle of the chapter (2: 281.31–35, 286.24), but it is not without application to Dominie Sampson’s apparent craziness at the beginning. Later in the same novel the ‘Unfit to live or die’ epigraph to Chapter 57, from Measure for Measure, is equally applicable to Glossin and Hatteraick (348.27–29). Chapter 29 of The Antiquary refers most directly to Ochiltree’s memories of the times when he joined in the village sports, as the deceased parish pauper in Crabbe’s The Village had done in a motto inserted on the verso (3: 230.2–6); but there is a subtler spin-off application to the announcement of Steenie’s drowning that follows. Chapter 30 has an initial disconnect between the jocular marine jousting in the motto (Scott’s composition, inserted at proof stage) and the Antiquary’s opening ‘And the poor young fellow, Steenie Meiklebackit, is to be buried this morning’ (237.5–14); but the tone of the epigraph turns out to be the predominant one as Oldbuck and Hector engage in a sort of verbal and physical High Jinks on their way to the funeral in the next chapter whose motto (again by Scott) establishes the bleak mood from the outset. Scott’s own motto to Chapter 34, supplied at proof stage, is an impassioned imaging of the relationship between father and dead son, applicable in the first instance to Meiklebackit and then to Glenallan, though articulated by neither (267.4–9). In The Tale of Old Mortality Chapter 28 is headed by two lines spoken by the treacherous Edom taken from ‘Edom of Gordon’ in Percy’s Reliques (‘Gi’e ower your house, lady, he said – | Gi’e ower your house to me’: 4b: 221.15–17, inserted at proof stage): these are applicable to Morton’s perceived treachery, but it is actually Evandale who puts the surrender demand to Bellenden. The epigraph extracted from another Percy item, ‘Jemmy Dawson’, for Chapter 22 of The Heart of Mid-Lothian refers in the original to Jemmy’s true love accompanying him to the gallows (6: 191.16–20, inserted at proof stage): in the novel it can be applied either to David or Jeanie Deans, or to both. Similarly, in Chapter 9 of the same novel the lines from Crabbe’s Parish Register featuring the prudent marriage of a poor couple (72.18–24) have links with both the marriage of David and Rebecca at the beginning and the engagement of Reuben and Jeanie towards the end (the latter connection reinforced by the occurrence of the name Reuben in the motto). Mottoes can have an applicability beyond the chapter to which they are attached. Sometimes the reference is to the preceding or the succeeding chapter. In Chapter 18 of Guy Mannering the epigraph (‘Talk with a man out a window! – a proper saying’ (2: 95.25–26)) has been anticipated a few pages earlier in Arthur Mervyn’s account of Brown serenading Julia Mannering in his letter to her father: ‘Well, sir, I heard the sash of her window thrown up, the shutters opened, and her own

Mottoes  91 voice in conversation with some person who answered from below. This is no “Much ado about nothing”’ (89.22–25). In the second chapter of Kenilworth Launcelot Gobbo’s question to his blind father in The Merchant of Venice ‘Talk you of young Master Lancelot?’ (11: 11.36–37) seems to be a delayed parallel to Lambourne’s anonymous appearance in the first chapter: it has only a loose connection with the enquiries after departed comrades on the next page. The motto to Chapter 11 of The Heart of Mid-Lothian (added at proof stage) comes from Helena’s lamenting the deterioration of the relationship between herself and her childhood companion Hermione in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (6: 95.5–9). It has no relevance to the text it introduces, where Butler meets Robertson, and seems to have strayed from the previous chapter when Jeanie and Effie are at loggerheads. Later in the same novel in Chapter 44 the couplet from Dryden’s ‘To the Pious Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew’, ‘No more shalt thou behold thy sister’s face; | Thou hast already had her last embrace’ (added at proof stage), may be connected with the brief mention of ‘Effie’s second elopement’ (380.2–4, 34), but it most obviously relates to the full description of that event at the beginning of the following chapter. The epigraph from The Faerie Queene added at proof stage to Chapter 15 of The Black Dwarf (4a: 100.30–33) evidently refers to Isabella’s visit to the Dwarf’s hut in the following chapter. In The Tale of Old Mortality the factional strife from Venice Preserved is relevant to Chapter 30, but it is still more pertinent to Chapter 31 (4b: 236.2–4): in this case Scott’s original motto from Burns’s ‘The Holy Fair’ had been transferred to the following chapter, replacing one from Milton’s Lycidas, and Otway’s lines were supplied at proof stage. The insistent urging borrowed from The Comedy of Errors for Chapter 29 of The Bride of Lammermoor (7a: 228.9–14) comes fully into play in Lady Ashton’s persecution of Lucy in Chapter 30 (there is no manuscript for this part of the novel). Chapter 21 of Saint Ronan’s Well is unusual in having two epigraphs, both from Love’s Labour’s Lost (16: 196.6–10). The first, referring to revelry, is obviously relevant to the opening of the chapter; the other (‘Worthies away – the scene begins to cloud’) is not inappropriate to the chapter as complexities develop, but it really comes into its own with the serious darkening of the tone in Chapter 22. Mottoes may even look several chapters ahead. In The Tale of Old Mortality the account of the battle of Bothwell in Chapter 32 is unsurprisingly headed by a stanza from ‘The Battle of Bothwell Bridge’ in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (identified simply as ‘Old Ballad’ (4b: 255.2–6)), but that ballad has already been enlisted, without any ascription, for Chapter 27 in whose first paragraph Morton arrives at Hamilton where Bothwell is situated (with ‘sworn’ for ‘bound’ and ‘gae’ for ‘do’: 214.10–11). The earlier occurrence was inserted at proof stage. In The Pirate Helena’s lament used earlier, in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, reappears as an epigram entirely appropriate for Minna and Brenda’s tiff

92 Mottoes in Chapter 20 (12: 186.32–36, a verso insertion), but it is recapitulated near the beginning of Chapter 29: ‘the two sisters, pressed as close to each other’s side as two flowers on the same stalk, sate with their arms reciprocally passed over each other’s shoulder, as if they feared some new and unforeseen cause of coldness was about to snatch them from each other’s side, and interrupt the sister-like harmony which had been but just restored’ (269.28–33). In The Heart of Mid-Lothian Chapter 48 is headed with a motto from 2 Henry VI (inserted at proof stage): ‘Lord! who would live turmoiled in a court, | And may enjoy such quiet walks as these?’ (6: 411.36–38). This introduces an account of Jeanie’s domestic happiness at Roseneath and reinforces the pastoral mode of the fourth volume. The motif is subtly taken up again fifty pages later where it becomes clear that Effie is incapable of sharing such a uniformly uneventful existence: ‘Effie, from her earliest youth, was never formed for a quiet low content. Far different from her sister, she required the dissipation of society to divert her sorrow, or enhance her joy’ (467.34–37: Scott echoes As You Like It, where Orlando says to Adam ‘We’ll light upon some settled low content’, as well as Pope’s translation of the Odyssey (‘And moves the sorrows to enhance the joys’)). Some mottoes have a more general applicability beyond their own chapters. In The Black Dwarf the lines from Campbell’s ‘Lochiel’s Warning’ at the head of Chapter 7 (inserted at proof stage) refer there purely to the devastation of Hobbie’s home (4a: 45.15–20), but they resonate more widely with the Jacobite element in the novel. The title of ‘The Highland Widow’ in Chronicles of the Canongate is referred to by implication in the quotation of lines from Burns’s poem of that name heading Chapter 8, though the ascription ‘Old Song’ restricts the appreciation of the subtlety to a limited range of readers (20: 76.28–36). The first epigraph in The Monastery (9: 31.5–15, a verso insertion) with its attribution of most, but by no means all, ills of the pre-Reformation period to the Church may be seen as referring back to the Protestant emphasis at the end of the Author’s Answer (30.5–8), and forward to the entire narrative. A less certain extension can be found in the lines from Henry VIII prefixed to Chapter 23 of Anne of Geierstein (inserted at proof stage): — Affairs that walk (As they say spirits do) at midnight, have In them a wilder nature, than the business That seeks dispatch by day. (22: 253.5–8) The immediate application would appear to be to Schreckenwald’s arranging a very early departure from Arnheim, but it is not a strong match, and most readers will probably find a wider resonance with Anne’s nocturnal expedition in the previous volume. Nicola J. Watson analyses

Mottoes  93 the complex mixture of immediate and delayed effects produced by the motto to Chapter 22 of Guy Mannering (2: 117.7–11), taken from The Winter’s Tale: [It] has immediate purchase upon the narrative in that it introduces a radical change of tone in the novel to something more light-hearted and optimistic. It also provides a gloss on the opening action of the chapter … . More puzzling for the well-read, however, is to what extent Brown may prove to have any similarities to Autolycus in this chapter and the remainder of the novel. At this juncture, Brown is, like Autolycus, a distinctly ambiguous adventurer; it remains to be seen whether this young man whose clothes do not quite indicate his identity is a fraudster or a prince in disguise, and whether the romance trajectory of The Winter’s Tale towards reconciliation and restoration predicts his fate in the novel as a whole. The epigraph thus opens up a range of possibilities that resonate for the reader around the stranger. Watson sees this as an example of the way in which ‘the romantic epigraph may serve to predict both character and plot-line but the connections are often obscure, elusive, oblique, bafflingly multiple and slow-burning’.14 Michael Alexander notes a case where two mottoes span an entire novel: those to the first and fourth chapters of Ivanhoe taken from Pope’s translation of the Odyssey (8: 15.5–9, 40.2–10) have an obvious immediate relevance to the chapters they preface, but they may also be seen to hint at the eventual outcome of the novel, with the swineherd Gurth helping his master to reclaim his inheritance just as Eumaeus does in Homer.15 In one instance an epigraph actually looks beyond the end of the novel. The final motto of The Monastery (inserted at proof stage) consists of a line from King John, ‘Gone to be married? – Gone to swear a peace!’ (9: 336.28–29). On its own the motto is of the usual happy-ending variety, but taken in context as the beginning of a bitter and foreboding speech by Constance it adumbrates the uncertain end of the novel and the disruptions of its companion fiction The Abbot (the two novels, it may be recalled, were originally envisaged as a single entity). Some epigraphs act as implicit moral comments on the text. Chapter 12 of Guy Mannering is headed by a statement from Jonson’s The New Inn (2: 67.2–11) that true valour is to be found in moderation: this functions as a critique of Mannering’s account in a letter to Arthur Mervyn of his duel with Brown, and of Mervyn’s sympathetic response in Chapter 16, avoiding the need for the Authorial voice to comment on a contentious subject. Less controversially, the mottoes for Chapters 23 and  24 of Ivanhoe match Bracy’s rough advances to Rebecca with those of Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (8: 186.33–37) and Glenalvon in Home’s Douglas (193.13–14): their combined commentary is hardly

94 Mottoes necessary, but they drive the moral point home.16 A trenchant criticism of Charles’s behaviour (as ‘Louis’) to Alice is offered in the lines from Macbeth heading Chapter 25 of Woodstock: ‘Boundless intemperance | In nature is a tyranny – it hath been | The untimely emptying of many a throne, | And fall of many kings’ (19: 282.31–35). In The Tale of Old Mortality the mottoes taken from Hudibras for Chapters 16 and 18 make an important contribution to the denigration of the extreme Covenanters (4b: 135.10–12, 151.2–4, the latter a verso insertion), but in Chapter 15 the reader has had to leave behind the ironic mode of the epigraph from the same poem (127.30–36, another verso insertion) as the Puritan’s earnest attempt to make peace between bear and baiting dog is succeeded at the end of the chapter by a non-ironic narration of Evandale’s attempt (doomed, alas) to secure a truce. From time to time sets of two or more mottoes work in sequence. The Heart of Mid-Lothian has a series of four from Measure for Measure (to Chapters 18, 21, 23, and 26, all except the second supplied at proof stage) emphasising the parallel between Isabella’s situation and that of Jeanie Deans in the second volume; in the third volume three epigrams from Crabbe’s The Borough (Chapters 30, 33, and 35, the first two supplied at proof stage, the last a verso insertion) root the action in English provincial life; and in the final volume Burns’s ‘The Ordination’ and ‘The Holy Fair’ (the latter a verso insertion) are neatly paired in Chapters 46 and 47 for Butler’s induction at Roseneath. When in The Monastery Mysie Happer helps Sir Piercie Shafton to escape and insists on accompanying him there is a close parallel with the scene in The Two Noble Kinsmen where the jailor’s daughter, infatuated with Palamon, performs a similar service: Scott links the two chapters covering the episode (28 and 29) with mottoes separated by only two halflines in the play (9: 255.5–11, 264.2–6).17 In The Pirate two successive chapters (15 and 16) with epigrams from Romeo and Juliet help trace the movement of Mordaunt’s thoughts from general unease at his marginal role at the dancing to more serious concerns as to what may transpire after ‘this night’s revels’ (12: 137.2–6, 144.2–6). The three evenly spaced and increasingly ominous mottoes from one of the main sources of Kenilworth, Mickle’s poignant ballad ‘Cumnor Hall’, at Chapters 6, 22, and 41 reinforce the fatal progression of the narrative by their remorseless sequence, as does the pairing of two mottoes from Romeo and Juliet at Chapters 5 and 33 of The Bride of Lammermoor.18 More generally, in Guy Mannering the fact that a quarter of the epigrams have eighteenth-century sources may be felt as emphasising the date of the action (probably 1782 (2.496–500)), and its allusions to Burns are professionally and geographically apposite. In its successor, The Antiquary, more than a quarter of the mottoes are from the seventeenth century, reinforced by Scott’s own pseudo-Jacobean creations to match the antiquarian subject.

Mottoes  95 Sometimes one finds sequences of mottoes preparing the way for the conclusion of the novel. As observed at the beginning of this chapter, it was towards the end of Waverley that Scott began to use them, and those to Chapters 66 and 67 indicate that the story is being wound up with a marriage (1: 330.2–3, 335.2–3). Epigrams of a very different sort are required by Fergus’s trial and execution which have to be gone through before the more or less happy ending (340.29–30, 346.6–8), and the first pair must be put on hold. In Guy Mannering the closing process is signalled at the beginning of Chapter 55 with solemn lines from Crabbe’s ‘The Hall of Justice’ (a verso insertion) indicating that Meg’s life journey and the wanderings of the narrative are both about to terminate: For, though seduced and led astray, Thou’st travelled far and wandered long, Thy God hath seen thee all the way, And all the turns that led thee wrong. (2: 335.17–21) For the actual final chapter, Chapter 58, the motto is even more emphatic, though in a light tone with its derivation from Pope’s imitation of Swift, ‘The Happy Life of a Country Parson’: ‘To sum the whole – the close of all’ (352.29–30). Even readers who object to the huddled conclusion of The Black Dwarf can hardly fault the choice of epigrams from Shakespeare for the last three chapters: one (without ascription) sounding a note of hope for the recluse, doomed to be frustrated, from the final act of Timon of Athens and matching the misanthropic motto from the same work for Chapter 4 (4a: 107.27–31, 27.23–26); one recalling the interrupted wedding from Much Ado about Nothing (‘This looks not like a nuptial’: 112.24–25) to stress the disruption necessarily involved in the resolution; and one from the last of the seven ages of man in As You Like It (‘Last scene of all, | To close this strange eventful history’: 118.24–26). All of these mottoes were inserted at proof stage. On occasion an epigram adds a distinct dimension to the ensuing narrative. That to Chapter 20 of Guy Mannering, inserted at proof stage, where Dominie Sampson revels in the arrival of the Episcopal bookhoard, is taken from Boswell’s Life of Johnson (‘A gigantic genius, fit to grapple with whole libraries’ (2: 106.2–3)), enlisting Johnson’s formidable physical and bibliographical presence to reinforce the presentation of the librarian. The gypsies in Chapter 28 of the same work do not sing in the narrative, but they are matched with a motto drawing on a song from Joanna Baillie’s tragedy Orra, recommended by Scott for inclusion in Daniel Terry’s dramatic version of the novel (148.2–10). Also in Guy Mannering, Warwick’s gruesome description of Duke Humphrey’s body in 3 Henry VI, transferred from the previous chapter, contrasts with the forensic language elicited by the appearance of Kennedy’s body at the beginning of Chapter 10 (53.2–8 and 26–38), and the same quotation

96 Mottoes precedes Chapter 32 of Woodstock where Tomkins’s corpse is not described in the narrative (19: 363.2–8, a verso insertion). The epigraph from Robinson Crusoe, a verso insertion at the beginning of Chapter 16 of Rob Roy, may at first seem an odd link with Frank’s concern about Die Vernon’s mysterious visitor, but it reinforces his sense of loneliness and paranoia (5: 130.2–5). In A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, a passage from Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum sketches in a putative military babyhood for Dalgetty at the head of Chapter 2 (7b: 12.30–36), and in the same novel the final lines of Montrose’s celebrated ‘I’ll never love thee more’ act as an agreeable, if gratuitous, embellishment to Chapter 15 with its analysis of his career (121.4–12).19 The contrasting relationships of Sussex and Leicester with Elizabeth are presented in detached essay mode at the beginning of Chapter 14 of Kenilworth, but this detachment is contrasted with the image of the ‘two bulls fierce battling on the green | For one fair heifer’ in the preceding motto, of Scott’s own composition (11: 131.30–36): the reader who has not skipped the epigram is likely to read the essay rather differently from one who has. In Chapter 6 of Woodstock, unusually, it seems that an attempt to provide an extra dimension has been imperfectly executed. At the end of Chapter 5 Mark Everard is engaged in solitary reading in an attempt to divert his thoughts from the personal problems of the Lee family. As the following chapter opens he considers the possibility of a direct appeal to Cromwell. The ascription of the motto for this chapter, apparently Scott’s own composition (19: 68.2–13), was originally ‘anonymous’, but this was changed in proof to ‘Herbert’ (the relevant leaf of the manuscript is missing). It is not entirely clear which Herbert is intended. The lines have as their subject the inevitability of eventual falling asleep, even if sleep is scorned as an opiate. The motto is immediately referred to in the first sentence of the chapter: ‘Colonel Everard had felt the truth contained in the verses of the quaint old bard whom we have quoted above’. But there is no support in the text for this assertion, except for a partial match when he does eventually succumb: He hardened himself, therefore, to the act, made up and addressed his packet to the Lord General, and then sealed it with his seal of arms. This done, he lay back in his chair; and, in spite of his expectations to the contrary, fell asleep in the course of his reflections, anxious and harassing as they were, and did not awaken until the cold grey light of dawn was peeping through the eastern oriel. (71.1–7) It may well be that Scott intended to introduce a scorn of the opiate of sleep into the text but omitted to do so. As things stand the reader has to effect the introduction if the motto is to be fully taken on board. A single epigraph can signal a change in the whole mood of the narrative. In Guy Mannering, after the good-natured pastoral of Brown’s stay

Mottoes  97 with the Dinmont family, Chapter 27 is heralded by lines from Joanna Baillie’s tragedy Ethwald: ‘If thou hast any love of mercy in thee, | Turn me upon my face that I may die’ (2: 142.7–9). The abrupt transition prepares the reader for the death scene supervised by Meg Merilees that follows. In Saint Ronan’s Well two lines of Scott’s own composing supplied at proof stage for Chapter 9 set the tone for the encounter between the former lovers Tyrrel and Clara and the Gothic plot centring on them: ‘We meet as shadows in the land of dreams, | Which speak not but in signs’ (16: 80.33–34). Sometimes the link between motto and text is provided by shared imagery, as with a number of the allusions discussed in the previous chapter. In Kenilworth an epigraph from Prior’s ‘The Dove’ at Chapter 34, inserted on the verso, taps in to the predominant bird imagery of the novel; one from Macbeth for Chapter 21 supplements the motif of perilous ascent; and four of Scott’s own composition reinforce the many voyaging images (Chapters 5, 7, 17, and 29, the last two both attributed to ‘Shipwreck’).20 Similarly the motto to Chapter 30 of Quentin Durward, supplied by Scott in proof, is aligned with the prominent sequence of nautical images in that work, and the novel’s taut construction involves a further motto-text link: the threat of thunder and lightning from King to envoy articulated in the lines from King John for Chapter 8 (15: 92.26–30), and a matching motto for Charles from Thomson’s ‘Summer’, for Chapter 27 (292.15–18), are two of many references to the potential for violence also found in some twenty meteorological and military images throughout the narrative. Mines threaten to explode, 21 and even Quentin’s eating is a military assault evoking Richard III (45.36–46.17, 132.6–8). In Woodstock the Lodge is more than once envisaged as a labyrinth, and the motto to Chapter 33 joins in with lines from ‘Fair Rosamond’ in Percy’s Reliques, ending with ‘a clew of thread’ (19: 382.18): the maze image is immediately reinforced no fewer than four times. 22 The frequent martial images in Count Robert of Paris are taken up in the epigraph to Chapter 17 where Nicephorus’ infatuation with Brenhilda is presented as a torch likely to blow up a mine of explosives (23a: 179.8–13), 23 anticipating in particular his own imaging of his wooing as a military campaign (192.31–37). On a more domestic scale, the motto to Chapter 38 of Guy Mannering (Pope’s ‘Die and endow a college or a cat’ (2: 217.23)) links wittily with the late Miss Bertram’s pet (219.1) and the image of the lawyer Protocol as a cat teasing its prey (220.2–4). Often a motto’s effect is achieved by a degree of disjunction with the main text. This can contribute to the distancing of the reader from the narrative highlighted in the third chapter of the present study. Mervyn’s letter in Chapter 16 of Guy Mannering alerting Mannering to Julia’s serenade in the Lake District, is prefaced by four lines from The Beggar’s Opera which introduce a much more detached tone than that adopted by the urbane correspondent (2: 87.2–6). The degree of mismatch is

98 Mottoes startling, given that Mannering has ‘incredible pain’ in relating the story (88.36–37). No doubt it would have startled Captain Clutterbuck in The Monastery: placing lines from Burns’s ‘On the Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations thro’ Scotland, collecting the Antiquities of that Kingdom’ as his own motto at the outset of his brief autobiographical sketch, in imitation of the Author of Waverley’s practice, he finds both Burns and the Author ‘somewhat too apt to treat with levity [their] own pursuits’ (9: 3.24–4.3). The exuberant defiance by a man about to be hanged in Burns’s ‘McPherson’s Farewell’ (labelled ‘Old Song’) as the epigraph to Chapter 6 of Quentin Durward, supplied by Scott in proof, is to some extent an ironic introduction to the scene where the hero is threatened with the same fate (15: 68.16–20), but it is matched in part by Petit-André’s professional performance: ‘“Courage, my fair son! since you must begin the dance, let the ball open gaily, for all the rebecs are in tune,” twitching the halter at the same time, to give point to his joke’ (77.41–43). Rarely, a mismatch may work in the opposite direction, from the grave to the less fraught, as when the very serious original motto (ascribed to ‘The Prison’, complete with act and scene number) prompted by the ensuing scene in the Glasgow tollbooth in Chapter 22 of Rob Roy finds its only tonal equivalent in Frank’s ‘can it be Diana in this abode of misery?’ (5: 173.12–22, 174.41). The mismatch in Chapter 20 of The Heart of Mid-Lothian is between two gravities: a quatrain of Scott’s composition ascribed to ‘Watts’s Hymns’, with a reassuring reference to anchoring ‘fast on heaven’ (6: 179.33–37), 24 and Jeanie’s crucial misunderstanding of her father’s advice to trust to the guidance of her conscience in determining whether or not to testify at her sister’s trial. Occasionally mismatches are notable for their wit. In Chapter 5 of The Pirate the motto from a traditional song ‘Get up and bar the door’ (12: 39.15–23) is followed by a dispute about unbarring a door. There is an intriguing example in Chapter 28 of Anne of Geierstein where the epigraph from As You Like It, inserted along with a chapter division on the verso, comes from a speech of Rosalind addressed to Silvius and referring to Phebe: ‘Why, ’tis a boisterous and cruel style, | A style for challengers. Why, she defies us, | Like Turk to Christian’ (22: 304.26–28). The application in the chapter is to the clearly very different rejection by Charles of the Swiss delegation’s overture. Scott has changed Rosalind’s ‘she defies me’ to ‘she defies us’, introducing the ducal plural but signalling the mismatch by retaining ‘she’. Contrariwise, the witty effect of several mottoes results from their offering matches obtrusively exact or deftly transferred. In Chapter 13 of Guy Mannering Pierre’s description to Jaffeir of the sale at the latter’s home, stoking resentment against Priuli, from Otway’s Venice Preserved (2: 73.10–18) provides a remarkably detailed parallel to the sale of Ellangowan (a ruffian, the appeal to legal justification, the public sale, the jesting), though Otway’s plot has no relevance to the situation in

Mottoes  99 the novel. Other notably neat matches include: the Abbot’s gold (from Dekker’s The Wonder of a Kingdom) introducing Dousterswivel’s deception of Sir Arthur at Chapter 21 of The Antiquary (3: 164.2–8), and a similar passage for Chapter 25 from King John (201.29–34); the application for Chapter 23 of The Tale of Old Mortality of Prince Hal’s ‘Got with much ease – now merrily to horse’ in 1 Henry IV to Cuddie’s entering Morton’s service with his plunder which includes two horses (4b: 184.19–20, added on the verso with a chapter division); the motto to Chapter 11 of Ivanhoe (8: 101.29–38) where, as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, outlaws enter into a relationship with their intended victims;25 in the same novel, Colley Cibber’s ‘Shadows, avaunt! – Richard’s himself again’, from his Richard III, transferred to the Black Knight’s revelation of his true identity in Chapter 40 (348.2); and John Gay’s mansion, in ‘A True Story of an Apparition’, ‘now degraded to a common inn’ exactly matching the fate of the jointure house at Duntarkin in Chapter 4 of Chronicles of the Canongate (20: 38.2–4, supplied at proof stage). A special sort of wit is on display in the lines from (Shakespeare’s) Richard III heading Chapter 19 of Saint Ronan’s Well (16: 177.3–5). The match is adequate, Mowbray’s letter seeking to reactivate Jekyl’s activity on his behalf being set alongside the King’s move from Buckingham to Tyrrel to effect the murder of the princes in the Tower; but the joke for those familiar with the play is that Scott’s Francis Tyrrel derives his surname from Richard’s agent.

4 Although the main link at least between epigraph and text is usually easily discernible, some of Scott’s mottoes present distinct challenges to the reader, and a number involve real problems and puzzles. The simplest sort of challenge arises when an epigraph highlights only a minor element in the chapter it is attached to. In the motto to Chapter 17 of The Tale of Old Mortality, inserted on the verso, Thomas Campbell’s ‘steed’ that ‘to the desert flies frantic and far’ in ‘Lochiel’s Warning’ highlights the Life-Guards’ horses which ‘began to fly masterless out of the confusion’ of battle (4b: 144.20, 146.10–11). Similarly, the double motto to Chapter 10 of Quentin Durward draws attention to Isabella’s singing heard by the hero in the middle of the chapter during his vigil (15: 118.3–8, 123.14–27). 26 But a minor element thus emphasised can be important in the novel as a whole. The epigraph to Chapter 36 of The Antiquary, from ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’, inserted at proof stage, contrasts ‘crabbed age and youth’ (3: 284.9–17): in the text that follows this can only apply to Oldbuck and Hector, but although the relationship between old men and youngsters plays a very small part in this particular chapter it is a pervasive theme of the novel.

100 Mottoes There is often a degree of obliquity in the relationship between epigraph and text, falling short of a pointed mismatch. In Chapter 51 of Guy Mannering the only strong connection between the motto taken from All’s Well that Ends Well and the narrative would appear to be that the name Bertram is prominent in both (2: 312.2–6): any parallel between Helena in the play and Julia Mannering or Dominie Sampson is tenuous. The magnificent lines from Paradise Lost inserted on the verso for Chapter 18 of The Antiquary with the story of Martin Waldeck share with the text a fiend and gold but little else (3: 136.34–39). Chapter 8 of The Heart of Mid-Lothian opens with Butler’s dawn meditation at the foot of the Salusbury Crags. The motto is a stanza from ‘Waly waly, love be bonny’ included in several classic collections, and the references to ‘Arthur’s-Seat’ and ‘Saint Anton’s wall’ are an obvious link with the location of Butler’s walk (6: 64.17–21). What may at first seem obtrusive is the reference to the abandonment of the female narrator in the song, which concludes with the lament that ‘a maid again Ise never be’. For this to be tied in, the reader needs to wait for the end of the second paragraph with its mention of ‘Effie Deans, the unfortunate handmaiden of the careful Mrs Saddletree’ (65.24–25). The epigraph to the last chapter of the same novel, provided at proof stage, is somewhat puzzling (461.21–27). It is taken from Talbot’s address to his son in 1 Henry VI before they are both killed in battle. The most likely point of contact in the text is in the fourth paragraph where Knockdunder observes to young Davie Butler that ‘you hae smelled pouther for the first time this day’ and instructs him to ‘hack off Donacha’s head, whilk will pe coot practice for you against the time you may wish to do the same kindness to a living shentleman’, but then withdraws the suggestion when he remembers that Davie’s father would not approve (462.4–12). It is possible there may be a secondary application to the Whistler, to whom the ‘malignant and ill-boding stars’ would be slightly more relevant. When the relevance of an epigraph is obscure at first sight, the repetition of a key word can make the application clear: in Woodstock, the motto of Scott’s composing for Chapter 4, inserted on the verso, centres on the guidance of ‘Duty’ (19: 46.6–20) and the repetition of that word ties it to Alice (52.15, 53.32). Later in the same novel another Scott motto, to Chapter 16 (‘We do that in our zeal, | Our calmer moments are afraid to answer’: 179.2–3, inserted in proof), is similarly tied to the Presbyterian clergyman Holdenough who confesses he has erred ‘in suffering my zeal to outrun my charity’ (191.24–25). Some epigraphs are extremely difficult to match with anything in the chapter they are attached to or in its successor. Those to Chapters 30 and 31 of The Betrothed are a pair in point. The first (18a: 250.5–8), taken from Shylock’s ‘A vow, a vow – I have a vow in heaven. | Shall I bring perjury upon my soul? | No, not for Venice’, can perhaps be seen as a comment on Hugh de Lacy’s vow to face his misfortunes like a

Mottoes  101 man (251.29), or his pledge to reward Guarine and Vidal (256.18–21), or both. There seems to be nothing in Chapter 31 to match Scott’s own ballad imitation (257.2–10): it may be a remote reference to the Constable’s withdrawal of his claim to Eveline in favour of Damian in the final chapter. To add to the difficulties at the end of The Betrothed, the ‘Christabel’ motto to the ‘Conclusion’ (267.17–20) is more appropriate for the original planned ending with its emphasis on Eveline rather than Damian (296–97). There may be some connection between the difficulty these mottoes present and Scott’s decreasing enthusiasm for the device noted above. But earlier in the series there is a similar problem. In The Bride of Lammermoor the motto to Chapter 19 (inserted at proof stage) comes from a speech in The Hogge hath Lost his Pearle, a poem by the seventeenth-century Robert Tailor, where a man planning an abduction criticises parental regulation of marital choice while recognising that filial disobedience may lead to divine retribution (7a: 148.7–15). The sentiment does not seem to relate directly to anything in the chapter, or the neighbourhood. At the end of the chapter Alice warns Ravenswood that ‘if you remain here, her [Lucy’s] destruction, or yours, or that of both, will be the inevitable consequences of her misplaced attachment’ (154.4–6): there is a tangential link here, but the motto seems to look well ahead in the narrative and it may have been added with the later action in mind.

5 As with Scott’s quotations in general, it is rare for an epigraph to appear exactly as it does in the source. The range of modifications is very wide. A few of the changes are probably inadvertent misreadings. It seems likely that in The Antiquary ‘place’ has been misread as ‘plan’ and ‘file’ as ‘style’ (3: 217.24–25), and ‘firmed’ as ‘formed’ (253.22). In The Betrothed the source and manuscript’s ‘Thin’ was apparently copied as ‘Then’ (18a: 111.26). In the same novel where in the Wordsworthian source, the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, ‘might bend’ is followed by ‘did blend’, Scott carelessly writes ‘might blend’, creating a pointless and clumsy repetition (187.7). Another introduction of a repeated word in The Antiquary involves the substitution of ‘receding waters’ for ‘receding billows’ duplicating the ‘watery waste’ in the preceding line of the Crabbe original in The Borough, an unfortunate seepage (3: 53.25). Similar damage is done when Scott replaces ‘royal’ with ‘noble’ in a Woodstock motto derived from Richard II, with ‘noble’ retained in the reply, disrupting Shakespeare’s wordplay on the rial and noble coins (19: 225.27–28). The substitution of ‘shone’ for ‘shine’ in the epigram from Southey’s ‘Rudiger’ used for Chapter 17 of Anne of Geierstein results in an unconvincing half-rhyme with the final ‘Rhine’: it may have been a misreading, but in the last line Southey’s ‘Gleam’ becomes ‘Gleam’d’ (22: 184.10–14).

102 Mottoes It is usually impossible to determine how far Scott’s alterations to the sources for his mottoes are intentional. Additional changes in the extract from Wordsworth mentioned in the previous paragraph are evidently deliberate, to make it free-standing: ‘Thy Image falls to earth’ becomes ‘The Virgin’s image falls’, and ‘reconciled in Thee’ becomes ‘reconciled in her’. But other alterations of that poet are more likely to be result of imperfect recollection: in The Bride of Lammermoor ‘Sole-sitting’, in ‘Poems on the Naming of Places IV’ is conventionalised to ‘Lone sitting’ (7a: 154.20 – the ‘her own’ for ‘its own’ in the first line of the motto is no doubt a deliberate adjustment to accommodate the change from a fern to Lucy); lines from ‘Hart-Leap Well’ already used in Saint Ronan’s Well, where Scott asked for the exact words to be put on the title-page (16: 416), are comprehensively impaired in The Betrothed (18a: 208.12–14, 408); 27 and in Woodstock ‘Among thy branches safe he lay’, from ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’, appears as the less distinctive ‘Beneath thy branches he did stay’ (19: 234.8 – there are other small changes). Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ is a more complex case. Scott draws on it for a motto relating to Isabella’s abduction in The Black Dwarf (4a: 74.4–10). There are substantial variants from the poem as published in May 1816. It is possible Scott saw it in print before or during the composition of the novel, but we know he had encountered it in a recitation by John Stoddart at the turn of the century, 28 and the variants (given here in italics) may derive in part or entirely from that occasion, though there is probably also deliberate variation in ‘ruffians’: Five warriors Three ruffians seized me yester morn Me, even me, a maid forlorn: Alas! a maiden most forlorn; They choked my cries with force and fright wicked might, And tied bound me on a palfrey white: As sure as Heaven shall rescue pity me, I have no thought cannot tell what men they be. The first four lines are used again for the motto to Chapter 24 of The Betrothed (18a: 201.21–25), in a slightly delayed reaction to Eveline’s abduction, with the same variants, except that there are now, for no obvious reason, four ruffians. The use of the passage in The Black Dwarf is the richer, with overtones of Isabella as vicarious sufferer (‘thy virtue shall save him’ (4a: 111.20)), accompanied by an Isabella/Christabel jingle. Changes to the source texts of epigraphs resulting from Scott’s creative or fallible memory are sometimes of little consequence, especially when a traditional piece or a minor poet is involved. As a ballad editor, it was noted earlier, Scott was used to treating his material with considerable freedom. It is no surprise, then, to observe him varying the details

Mottoes  103 of a stanza from ‘The Douglas Tragedy’ in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border for the motto to Chapter 36 of The Abbot (10: 343.33–37). The Minstrelsy version reads: He’s mounted her on a milk-white steed, And himself on a dapple grey, With a bugelet horn hung down by his side, And lightly they rode away. The novel has: He mounted himself on a coal-black steed, And her on a freckled grey, With a bugelet horn hung down from his side, And roundly they rode away. Scott’s memory has adopted the colours of the horses from another of the Minstrelsy ballads, ‘Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead’, stanza 21: ‘He’s set his twa sons on coal-black steeds, | Himsel’ upon a freckled gray’. The motto to Chapter 22 of Kenilworth is one of the three drawn from Mickle’s modern ballad ‘Cumnor Hall’ (11: 216.17–25). As well as choosing two separate stanzas, reversing their order, and making minor alterations to fit the fictional context, Scott has ‘wonted speed’ for Mickle’s ‘lover’s speede’. It would be difficult to apportion a prize between these readings, or between the original stanza from Thomas Penrose’s ‘The Field of Battle’ and Scott’s version for Chapter 20 of A Legend of the Wars of Montrose: Faintly bray’d the battle’s roar Distant down the hollow wind; Panting terror fled before, Wounds and death were left behind. Faint the din of battle bray’d, Distant down the hollow wind; War and terror fled before, Wounds and death remained behind. (7b: 157.25–28) Scott used the lines for two further mottoes. For Chapter 36 of The Monastery Penrose’s ‘were left’ is restored in the last line (9: 325.17), and in the text Scott’s ‘War and terror’ is imaginatively confirmed: ‘War and terror, to use the expression of the poet, had rushed on to the pursuit, and left only wounds and death behind them’ (329.10–12). On the third appearance, in Anne of Geierstein, ‘were left’ is preserved, but there is a new reading in the second line, the less common ‘heavy wind’ (22: 392.13–17).

104 Mottoes Some of the epigrams involve radical alterations, apparently inadvertent since the changes serve no fictional purpose. A notable example is the treatment of Burns’s ‘Epigram on a Visit to Inverary’, appropriate for the setting of the dungeon scene at that location in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (7b: 97.8–13). Burns wrote: Whoe’er he be that sojourns here, I pity much his case, Unless he come to wait upon The Lord their God, his Grace. Scott has: Whatever stranger visits here, We pity his sad case, Unless to worship he draw near, The King of Kings – his Grace. Another adaptation so free as to be almost an original composition can be found in the lines from Prior’s ‘The Dove’ prefixed to Chapter 34 of Kenilworth (11: 315.36–39). Prior wrote: Or have You mark’d a Partridge quake, Viewing the tow’ring Faulcon nigh? She cuddles low behind the Brake, Nor wou’d she stay: nor dares she fly. Scott has: Have you not seen the partridge quake, Viewing the hawk approaching nigh? She cuddles close beneath the brake, Afraid to sit, afraid to fly. The first two lines are weaker in Scott’s version, but the third and fourth are very acceptable variants. On one occasion, in The Surgeon’s Daughter (20: 273.31–39), a motto is actually endorsed in print ‘Quoted from memory’. The first of the two stanzas from Campbell’s ‘The Turkish Lady’ is perfectly recollected, but Scott supplies most of the second stanza. In the original this reads: Day her sultry fires had wasted; Calm and sweet the moonlight rose; Even a captive spirit tasted Half oblivion of his woes.

Mottoes  105 Scott has: Day his sultry fires had wasted, Calm and cool the moonbeams shone; To the Vizier’s lofty palace One bold Christian came alone. The new lines were apparently suggested by those beginning the next stanza in Campbell’s poem (‘Then ’twas from an Emir’s palace | Came an Eastern lady bright’), and it is they that most obviously relate to the ensuing chapter. A few of the mottoes are essentially Scott’s own but based on hints in existing texts. The first chapter of The Fortunes of Nigel is prefaced by five largely original octosyllabic couplets ascribed to ‘The Reformation’ (13: 19.5–15): their description of the refining of the Scot’s apparel as he crosses the Tweed was clearly suggested by the traditional poem ‘The bonny Scot made a Gentleman’ in Joseph Ritson’s little pamphlet The North-Country Chorister published in 1802. The closest imitation (typically made more polite) is in the penultimate couplet of the motto which echoes the final stanza of the nine-stanza poem: Thy sword at thy arse was a great black blade, With a great basket hilt of iron made; But [now] a long rapier doth hang by his side, And huffling doth this bonny Scot ride. Bonny Scot, we all witness can That England hath made thee a gentleman. 29 Scott’s couplet reads ‘His back-sword with the iron hilt, | To rapier fairly hatch’d and gilt’. The four-line motto to Chapter 21 of the same novel takes as its point of departure Swift’s couplet ‘Rove not from Pole to Pole, but step in here, | Where nought excels the Shaving – but the Beer’, varying the original couplet and adding another (228.2–6). There is a complex example in the couplet functioning as epigraph to Chapter 37 of Peveril of the Peak. The second line, ‘And I must live, for Buckingham commends’, is varied from Pope’s ‘And thou shalt live; for Buckingham commends’ in ‘Occasion’d by some Verses of … Buckingham’. The first line is of Scott’s devising, but he incorporates the phrase ‘Fortune and I are friends’ from Troilus and Cressida (14: 380.11–13). For Chapter 8 of Saint Ronan’s Well he took a hint from a couplet in Prior’s ‘Hans Carvel’: ‘Go then this Ev’ning, Master Carvel, | Lay down your Fowls, and broach your Barrel’. He deleted the first line, changed the second to read ‘They draw the cork, they broach the barrel’, and wittily added a new line to complete the couplet and introduce the dispute between Binks and Tyrrel, ‘And first they kiss, and then they quarrel’ (16: 70.4–6).

106 Mottoes There is some uncertainty about the degree of Scott’s input into the epigraph to Chapter 26 of The Talisman. The poem it is based on, ‘Song of Genius’ by Helen Cranstoun, was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century. The published version lacks the third stanza of the motto, and the first two stanzas (appearing as one) are varied, especially the third line which reads ‘For thoughts may past delights recall’. Scott very likely heard it read by the author, and he may well have added the final four lines himself; on the other hand it may be that they were present in the recitation (18b: 236.12–24). Some of the changes in the mottoes that seem likely to be deliberate are of sorts familiar from the examples cited in the previous chapter. Archaic language is modernised, ‘nappy ale’ becoming ‘good ale’ and ‘pot-sale’ becoming simply ‘sale’ in the motto from Skelton’s ‘The Tunning of Elynour Rumming’ at the outset of Saint Ronan’s Well (16: 1.6–9). The extract from ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawaine’ from Percy’s Reliques for Chapter 53 of Guy Mannering is more extensively updated (2: 324.30–38). There are straightforward changes to adapt mottoes to the fictional context. In the second line of the extract from William Meston’s ‘A Lochaber Tale’ used for Chapter 4 of A Legend of the Wars of Montrose ‘Fair’ is changed to ‘glen’, necessitating the alteration of ‘where’ in the first line to ‘when’ (7b: 25.14–22). A more fundamental alteration can be observed in the epigram to Chapter 8 of The Black Dwarf, where we find Scott retaining the last two lines of a stanza from ‘Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead’ in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and replacing the first two with his own to suit the context: the Minstrelsy has ‘Gar warn the water, braid and wide, | Gar warn it sune and hastily!’ and the motto reads ‘Now horse and hattock, cried the laird, – | Now horse and hattock, speedelie’ (4a: 54.2–6 – ‘speedelie’ is the last word of the preceding stanza in the Minstrelsy). Passages are sometimes abbreviated to fit the context. When the soldier from the seven ages of man in As You Like It is used as a motto introducing Le Balafré in Chapter 5 of Quentin Durward (15: 59.3–6) Scott omits the line ‘Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel’: Le Balafré is not noted for either of these qualities. On one occasion, in Chapter 21 of The Talisman, Scott originally abbreviated the following passage from Macbeth: — and wither’d murder, Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. Since the motto introduces the pretended Nubian slave’s saving of Richard from the Charegite’s assault Scott omitted the words ‘Alarum’d

Mottoes  107 by his sentinel, the wolf, | Whose howl’s his watch’. In proof Ballantyne wrote: ‘I do not see why the whole of this fine quotation (hardly finer than what it precedes) should not be given’, to which Scott replied ‘Do as ye list – I only took what seemd appropriate’ (18b: 194.2–7, 298–99). Presumably he thought this an unimportant point that might be conceded, but it may well be felt that the abbreviated version was indeed more appropriate. Oddly, when abridging a passage from Ben Jonson’s The New Inn for the Hawes inn in The Antiquary (3: 12.2–10) Scott omits the line following the fourth of the motto ‘Or clarified whey, instead of Claret’, which would link neatly enough with the landlord’s lament for the lost sale of ‘sax pints o’ gude claret’ on Oldbuck’s last visit (17.2–3). An epigraph may fuse material from different parts of the source text. For that to Chapter 13 of The Pirate Scott carries out a neat combination of couplets from various locations in the eighth book of Pope’s translation of the Odyssey (12: 121.5–11). The first couplet is substantially varied, the second line being a distinct improvement on the odd original. Pope has ‘Before his seat a polish’d table shines, | And a full goblet foams with gen’rous wines’, which becomes ‘Full in the midst the polish’d table shines, | And the bright goblets, rich with generous wines’. The second couplet is unchanged except for a weakening of ‘his portion’ to ‘the portion’. The final couplet is largely transformed to suit the context: Pope’s ‘When now the rage of hunger was allay’d, | Thus to the Lyrist wise Ulysses said’ becomes ‘Nor till the rage of thirst and hunger ceased, | To the high host approached the sagacious guest’. There are times when the form of the source material is changed for the motto. A passage from The Coxcomb by Beaumont and Fletcher is abridged and converted to verse to provide the heading for Chapter 27 of Kenilworth (11: 265.19–22), and a similar conversion of the same play is effected for the motto to Chapter 31 of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, where the original reads ‘Either binde her quickly and come away, or by this steele Ile tell though I trusse for company’ and the motto ‘Bind her quickly; or, by this steel, | I’ll tell, although I truss for company’ (6: 266.12–14). The epigraph to Chapter 14 of Chronicles of the Canongate converts two lines to four and introduces an extra rhyme (‘requite’ for ‘record’ (20: 147.6–10)). On two occasions at least Scott’s mottoes attempt to improve their originals by eliminating clumsy repetitions. Shakespeare’s ‘screech-owl, screeching loud’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream arguably works as onomatopoeia, but Scott’s ‘sounding loud’ in Woodstock may well be an improvement (19: 154.27), as more certainly is his change of Home’s ‘dread name’ in Douglas to ‘dread sound’ in Castle Dangerous to avoid the repetition with ‘his name’ in the next line (23b: 3.11). Many of the mottoes, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, are wholly of Scott’s devising, most of them ascribed to ‘Old Play’30 and

108 Mottoes couched in imitation Beaumont and Fletcher blank verse with final hypermetrical syllables (there is one ascription to Beaumont and Fletcher which is apparently Scott’s own composition, but it is too short to have any stylistic appropriateness to those authors (19: 120.5–7)). The fictional nature of the ascription is self-evident in at least one case: the first epigraph in The Monastery ends with a reference to Moll White, taken from the Spectator (9: 31.5–15). ‘Old Play’ can obscure a genuine source. The motto to Chapter 42 of Ivanhoe, so ascribed, comes with only unimportant minor variants from Webster’s The White Devil (8: 370.27–32), whereas the short extract from the same play two chapters later is correctly credited (392.7–8). The line attributed to ‘Old Play’ for Chapter 15 of Anne of Geierstein is actually from Coleridge’s poem ‘The Dungeon’ published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 (22: 153.30–31). The ascriptions to ‘Old Play’ are complemented by several apparently bogus creditings to specific authors and works, such as: Edmund Waller in The Bride of Lammermoor and The Betrothed (7a: 186.33–37; 18a: 211.26–28); Donne in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (7b: 21.31–35); Dekker, and Scott’s contemporary James Duff in The Monastery (9: 97.25–28, 161.24–29); Ben Jonson in Peveril of the Peak (14: 202.17–19), and in the same work Skelton (or rather, the title of one of his poems: 452.8–15) and the fifteenth-century romance Le Petit Jehan de Saintré (460.2–6); Samuel Butler in Saint Ronan’s Well (16: 153.3–9); ‘Ancient Scottish Ballad’ in The Betrothed (18a: 257.2–10); Sir David Lindsay in The Talisman (18b: 102.27–33); and an unidentified ‘Captain Marjoribanks’ in The Fair Maid of Perth (21: 3.8–12). The amusement Scott derived from such spoof ascriptions is evident in a letter of 1827: ‘I was internally very much diverted by a lady who would fain have persuaded me that she was a great admirer of Dr Watts hymns & quoted one of these same little deceptions’. 31 He is referring to the motto for Chapter 20 of The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Scott makes particular play with ascriptions to the Restoration dramatist Thomas Otway in Peveril of the Peak (set in the period): the single-line epigraph to Chapter 13 credited to that author is actually from the eighteenth-century Arthur Murphy’s The Apprentice, burlesquing David Garrick (14: 129.5–6); that to the following chapter, also attributed to Otway, is apparently by Scott himself (139.10–12); but the motto to Chapter 21 is indeed from Otway as indicated, and consists of the first two lines of Venice Preserved, with a fair chance of being recognised by some readers at least (210.2–3). For good measure the joke is reinforced by the original ‘Old Play’ heading Chapter 16 where one of the speeches is given to ‘Acasto’, the name of a character in Otway’s tragedy The Orphan (162.2–11). There is another original motto with Otway’s name attached in The Betrothed (18a: 230.2–4). For the sixth chapter of The Fair Maid of Perth the line ‘Never to man shall Catherine give her hand’ is plausibly ascribed to

Mottoes  109 ‘Taming of a Shrew’, but it occurs neither in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew nor in the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew (21: 53.9–10). On one occasion, beginning Chapter 5 in Woodstock, Scott left an original epigraph unascribed. James Ballantyne asked ‘From what?’ and Scott wrote ‘The Devil’ but substituted the ascription ‘J. B.’ (19: 56.9–15, 439–40). In the case of several joke ascriptions Scott has made a particular attempt to copy the style of the authors concerned: Sir David Lindsay for a couplet actually derived from 1 Henry VI (6: 41.10–12); Gavin Douglas for a translation of a Latin motto into Scots in The Abbot (10: 5.7–8); the contemporaneous American poet William Frenaud in Anne of Geierstein (22: 58.7–12); and Isaac Watts in Count Robert of Paris (23a: 92.2–6). There is a minor witticism in the introduction of the contrast between Dick and Adam in The Surgeon’s Daughter by means of an original quatrain with the title ‘Tom and Dick’, a poem by Charles Dibdin (20: 187.12–16). One or two misattributions may well be inadvertent. For example, the motto to Chapter 13 of Ivanhoe is not from the Iliad, but from William Wilkie’s imitation of Pope’s Homeric translations entitled The Epigoniad (8: 117.24–30); and in Saint Ronan’s Well lines from Goldsmith’s description of a country clergyman in The Deserted Village are attributed to ‘Dryden, from Chaucer’ (the Parson in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (16: 142.12–14)).

6 The epigraphs that appear on the title-pages of the novels (except for The Monastery, The Abbot, and Tales of the Crusaders) will in several cases repay particular attention. They were normally repeated on the title-page of each volume, so that readers who noticed such things may well have found their reactions changing as they progressed through the narrative: the reader of a single-volume edition has to make an effort to recover that original prompting. The brief title-page motto of Waverley (‘Under which King, Bezonian? speak, or die!’) is spoken as a light-hearted challenge in 2 Henry IV by Pistol to Shallow, who is unaware that Henry IV has died. The term ‘Bezonian’ means ‘ignoramus’. Most readers will not understand the word, which sits as a sort of icon at the centre of each title-page. Reactions will vary between detachment and involvement, jocularity and seriousness, depending on when the reader’s eye lights on it as the narrative of conflicting loyalties is played out. A more straightforward example, involving pure distancing, can be observed in the light ‘No scandal about Queen Elizabeth, I hope?’ from The Critic attached to Kenilworth (11: [393]). The lines from The Lay of the Last Minstrel on the title-page of Guy Mannering are part of an ongoing process of self-quotation in the novels designed as one of the strategies for fencing the far from impregnable secret of their authorship. The motto

110 Mottoes also keeps the astrological theme before the reader. There is a further playfulness, in that the astrology is never taken entirely seriously even at the outset. But there is seriousness too, for its persistence involves an acknowledgement that ‘still the heart doth need a language’, as Coleridge’s translation of Schiller’s The Piccolomini quoted in the fourth chapter has it (2: 18.45; the straightforward astrological motto on the next page from his translation of The Death of Wallenstein by the same author acts as a reinforcement).32 There is a further seriousness in the signalling of the novel’s remorseless fatalism. Scott’s freshly composed motto for The Antiquary emphasises certain characteristics of the antiquarian mind: shrewd and prudent, wise and cunning, shrewish and childish. The antiquarian aspect of the Author of Waverley, producing novels that are among much else cabinets of curiosities, is highlighted on the title-pages of the first three series of Tales of my Landlord with a stanza from Burns’s ‘On the Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations thro’ Scotland, collecting the Antiquities of that Kingdom’, a warning to folk throughout Scotland to mind their behaviour as ‘A chiel’s amang you takin’ notes, | An’ faith he’ll prent it’. Still greater detachment is involved in Ivanhoe where the motto from Prior’s ‘The Thief and the Cordelier’ (‘Now fitted the halter, now traversed the cart, | And often took leave, – but seem’d loth to depart!’) directs attention entirely to ‘the Author returning to the stage repeatedly after having taken leave’ (25b: 18.22–23). In contrast, the lines on the title-page of Rob Roy from Wordsworth’s poem ‘Rob Roy’s Grave’ stand in an oblique relationship to the narrative: as the eewn editor observes, Scott ‘denies Wordsworth’s poetic fashioning of Rob Roy even although the epigraph on the title page suggests that what follows will expand on the Wordsworthian image’ (5: 353). The motto to The Pirate (‘Nothing in him — | But doth suffer a sea-change’ from The Tempest) obviously heralds the nautical setting of that novel, or rather the constant interaction of sea and land, but ‘him’ may well be taken to refer to the Author’s moving into the unfamiliar territory of the Northern Isles, which is also part of the point of the motto to the first chapter. Complete concentration on the Author as a figure of amusement is also evident in The Fortunes of Nigel (‘Story? Lord bless you! I have none to tell, sir’, from Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin) and Peveril of the Peak (‘If my readers should at any time remark that I am particularly dull, they may be assured there is a design under it’ from Steele’s Tatler). In Woodstock the motto keeps an idealised Sir Henry Lee at the centre of the novel with its modernised line from the ‘General Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales: ‘He was a very perfect gentle Knight’.

7 Although in his later works Scott sometimes tires of finding, or inventing, appropriate epigrams, the predominant impression in the series is

Mottoes  111 one of considerable enjoyment. This is particularly evident in many of his own composing. Elizabeth’s approach to Kenilworth is marked by a remarkable verbal feu-de-joie (11: 282.6–13). In the late Anne of Geierstein the arrival at Basle is heralded by a short but exuberant motto clearly in excess of the demands of the occasion: They saw that city, welcoming the Rhine, As from his mountain heritage he bursts, As purposed proud Orgetorix of yore, Leaving the desert region of the hills, To lord it o’er the fertile plains of Gaul. (22: 75.2–6) The blank verse there is Miltonic, distinguished from the most frequently employed Beaumont and Fletcher mode where the verve can also be attractive: in the repetition of ‘He’s a monk … for he’s a monk’ in the same novel (340.29–32); or in the devastatingly grim concision of the motto introducing and commenting on the leading astray of Kenneth in The Talisman: You talk of Gaiety and Innocence! The moment when the fatal fruit was eaten, They parted ne’er to meet again; and Malice Has ever since been playmate to light Gaiety, From the first moment when the smiling infant Destroys the flower or butterfly he toys with, To the last chuckle of the dying miser, Who hears his neighbour hath been made a bankrupt. (18b: 125.2–9) Scott enjoys providing some of his own mottoes with imaginary and arbitrary ascriptions: in The Bride of Lammermoor there is ‘The French Courtezan’ for Chapter 18; in The Pirate we find ‘The Double Nuptials’ for Chapter 4, ‘Liliput, a Poem’ for Chapter 23, ‘Captivity, a Poem’ for Chapter 34, and a matching ‘’Tis Even that We’re at Odds’ and ‘’Tis Odds when Evens meet’ for Chapters 11 and 32; and The Fortunes of Nigel has ‘Skelton Skeltonizeth’ for Chapter 5, ‘Beef and Pudding, – An old English Comedy’ for Chapter 18, and two playfully recalling Chapter 4 of The Pirate: ‘Albion, or the double Kings’ for Chapter 13, and ‘The Double Bridal’ for Chapter 26. Roughly two-thirds of the original epigrams are in the blank verse of the old drama. Less frequently Scott adopts other forms. Mottoes in heroic couplets include the majestically aphoristic hailing of the Tay at the beginning of The Fair Maid of Perth (21: 11.5–8). There are a few passages in octosyllabics, and several in a variety of stanza forms, ranging from the prevailing quatrain to the unique. Among the quatrains there is a lively motto for Chapter 13 of The Betrothed heralding the departure

112 Mottoes of Eveline and De Lacy from Garde Douloureuse but going beyond what the situation involves: Too much rest is rust, There’s ever cheer in changing; We tyne by too much trust, So we’ll be up and ranging. (18a: 100.2–5) The unique stanza forms include the impressive ‘Toll, toll the bell!’ heralding Margaret’s funeral in Anne of Geierstein (22: 366.6–12). We cannot tell what prompted Scott to start using mottoes towards the end of his first novel. Dieter Berger suggests, pleasantly and plausibly, that there may be an element of secret compensation for his abandoned poetic career. 33 (One of the earliest reviewers even wondered ‘whether his prose works do not contain by far more real poetry than those of his productions which are usually called poetical’.)34 But the practice is of a piece with his circumbendibus and richly allusive style. There is an element of risk in the strategy, in that some readers may see the epigrams as emphasising limitations in Scott’s own English prose, with its tendency to competence rather than distinction. Scott has Frank acknowledge this at the beginning of the third chapter of Rob Roy: ‘I have tagged with rhyme and blank verse the subdivisions of this important narrative, in order to seduce your continued attention by powers of composition of stronger attraction than my own’ (5: 22.34–36: the first three chapters have mottoes from Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas, Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (a verso insertion), and Gay’s Fables). A more helpful way of approaching the mottoes, which are mostly in verse, would align them with the poetry in the main text, whether quoted or original. In The Bride of Lammermoor Edgar and Lucy find it difficult to express their feelings directly. Lucy’s most telling utterance (until her madness) is her song ‘Look not thou on Beauty’s charming’ (7a: 25.5–12), and for Edgar’s feelings the Author resorts to lines from Joanna Baillie’s Constantine Paleologus (164.9–15). Of the Baillie Wolfgang Müller observes: ‘The emotional tone of the quotation contrasts sharply with the narrator’s detached or almost coldly sober analysis of the psychic situation of the lovers …. The expression of feeling is, in this as in many other passages from Scott’s novels, delegated to a quotation’. 35 Marshall Brown elaborates eloquently: As Scott imagines and uses it, verse communicates not perfect knowledge but the limits of the knowable. It becomes immortal when, insofar as humans can, it grasps feelings that transcend situation, circumstance, and moment. … Scott’s fiction lives by the disconnect between matter and spirit, between consecutive event and permanent or eddying feelings. … For Scott … poetry does not find

Mottoes  113 its fulfillment in prose complexity …; rather, prose finds its fulfillment as poetic intensity.36 Probably the most striking example in all the Waverley Novels of the power of poetry to outsoar Scott’s analytical prose is to be found, again in the Bride, in the motto to the final chapter: Whose mind’s so marbled, and his heart so hard, That would not, when this huge mishap was heard, To th’ utmost note of sorrow set their song, To see a gallant, with so great a grace, So suddenly unthought on, so o’erthrown, And so to perish, in so poor a place, By too rash riding in a ground unknown! (262.24–30) This is actually an abbreviated version of an elegy by Alexander Garden on the death of Sir James Lawson of Humbie in 1612. In the original there is a line after the first (‘And who of Steel whose Stomacks are so strong,’), a couplet after the third (‘And elevate their Voice and Woes alone, | The highest Strain of any troubled tone.’), and eight additional lines (making eighteen in all). The abbreviation results in an immensely forceful utterance, setting the seal on the intensity of the tragic conclusion to the novel. It makes a perfect match for Edgar’s catastrophe, not least in that it echoes the repeated occurrences of ‘marble’ and ‘heart’ in the text. Taken on their own the mottoes could be regarded as a sort of commonplace book, or anthology, of striking passages. Many are from wellknown texts. Others are dredged up from the depths of the Abbotsford library and restored to life. Without their appearance at the beginning of Chapter 35 of The Bride of Lammermoor how many readers would ever have encountered the remarkable lines hidden away in the Appendix to the second volume of Alexander Nisbet’s A System of Heraldry?37 The two folio volumes of Scott’s copy of the second edition of 1804 are to be found on Shelf III in Press B of the principal library room, between Alexander Gordon’s Itinerarium Septentrionale (1726) and Robert Sibbald’s Scotia Illustrata (1684).

Notes 1 The first recorded use of chapter mottoes in fiction dates from 1752. The device was extensively employed by prominent novelists at the end of the century, notably Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, M. G. (‘Monk’) Lewis, Maria Edgeworth, and Susan Ferrier. See William Scott, ‘Mottoes from the English Poets as Chapter-Headings in the Novel’, Notes and Queries, 202 (1957), 478–80, and Dieter Berger, ‘“Damn the mottoe”: Scott and the Epigraph’, Anglia, 100 (1982), 373–96 (376).

114 Mottoes 2 Scott wrote to James Ballantyne in an undated note: ‘I send you more Guy. It is time to think of mottoes’: Letters, 4.1. 3 In revising Redgauntlet for the Magnum edition, Scott incongruously provided Letter 12 with a motto (17: 396). 4 Edinburgh Christian Instructor, 14 (January 1817), 41–73; (February 1817), 100–140 (101); (March 1817), 170–201. 5 See Lockhart, 4.13–14: ‘It may be worth noting, that it was in correcting the proof-sheets of this novel [The Antiquary] that Scott first took to equipping his chapters with mottoes of his own fabrication. On one occasion he happened to ask John Ballantyne, who was sitting by him, to hunt for a particular passage in Beaumont and Fletcher. John did as he was bid, but did not succeed in discovering the lines. “Hang it, Johnnie,” cried Scott, “I believe I can make a motto sooner than you will find one.” He did so accordingly; and from that hour, whenever memory failed to suggest an appropriate epigraph, he had recourse to the inexhaustible mines of “old play” or “old ballad,” to which we owe some of the most exquisite verses that ever flowed from his pen’. Lockhart recalls that towards the end of his life Scott responded to his son-in-law’s praise of the original mottoes: ‘Nothing so easy, … when you are full of an author, as to write a few lines in his taste and style; the difficulty is to keep it up’ (7.376). 6 For a complete set of brief comments on the Waverley mottoes the reader is referred to the website cited at the end of the Prefatory Notes. 7 The chapter division and motto are part of a verso insertion. 8 The point is well made by Dieter Berger, ‘“Damn the mottoe”: Scott and the Epigraph’, Anglia, 100 (1982), 373–96 (384). 9 2: 9.1, 138.31–32. Scott sent the first of the mottoes in a note, and added the second at proof stage. 10 For a valuable discussion of rereading Scott see Marilyn Orr, ‘“The Return of the Different”: Rereading in Scott and Calvino”’, Dalhousie Review, 71 (1991/92), 453–70. 11 In the new world that follows there is an Autolycus in Dandie Dinmont as two mottoes indicate (2: 117.7–11, 123.2–3); there is a virtual resurrection in Brown (338.23–24); but there can be no bringing Sophia Welwood back from the grave. See Millgate, 80–81. 12 There is neither manuscript nor proof for this part of Ivanhoe. 13 There is neither manuscript nor proof for these chapters of Ivanhoe. 14 Nicola J. Watson, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, in Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy: Great Shakespeareans, Volume V, ed. Adrian Poole (London: Continuum, 2011), 10–52 (25–26, 25). 15 Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 47. There is no manuscript for the opening of Ivanhoe, but both of the mottoes are present in the proof print. 16 There is neither manuscript nor proof for these chapters of Ivanhoe. 17 The first of these mottoes was originally attached to Chapter 27 but Scott issued a verso instruction to move it to its present position and came up with his own ‘Old Play’ lines for Chapter 27 at proof stage. 18 The motto to Chapter 5 is a proof insertion; that to Chapter 33 was supplied by Scott in a letter to James Ballantyne: National Library of Scotland ms 20159, f. 190r. 19 There is no manuscript for these chapters, but the mottoes are present in proof print.

Mottoes  115 20 The motto to Chapter 29 was originally that to Chapter 30, which Scott directed in the manuscript should be transferred: ‘Take the mottoe assignd to chapt. III [i.e. 4] for which another will be given’. 21 15: 277.14–17, 351.26–28, 372.27–28. 22 19: 382.23 and 28, 383.2, 384.2. See also 131.20, 362.27, 382.5. 23 There is no manuscript for this part of the novel: the motto is present in a late proof print. 24 The motto is introduced on the verso as part of an insertion starting a new chapter. 25 There is neither manuscript nor proof for this part of Ivanhoe. 26 The twin mottoes are not present in the manuscript, but they appear in the proof print. 27 As with the first edition of Saint Ronan’s Well (see 16: 416) the chapter motto in The Betrothed has (among other variants of Wordsworth’s original) a repetition of ‘place’ for ‘spot’, but the word ‘spot’ occurs in the text (18a: 208.16). 28 Letters, 8.421: Scott to Mrs Hughes, [11 November 1824]; Lockhart, 1.327. 29 The North-Country Chorister. An Unparalleled Variety of Excellent Songs. Collected and published together, for general amusement, by A Bishoprick Ballad-singer, [ed. Joseph Ritson,] (Durham, 1802), 13–14 (14). 30 There is a mischievous ‘New Play’ in ‘Old Play’ style for Chapter 14 of The Monastery (9: 128.2–11), and an equally mischievous set of four mottoes attributed to ‘The Spanish Father’ in the Abbot (Chapters 33, 34, 35, 37). 31 Letters, 10.233: 26 June [1827], to John Swinton of Kimmerghame. 32 Compare the motto of Scott’s own composition to Chapter 12 of The Monastery, which begins ‘There’s something in that ancient superstition, | Which, erring as it is, our fancy loves’ (9: 113.5–6). 33 Dieter Berger, ‘“Damn the mottoe”: Scott and the Epigraph’, Anglia, 100 (1982), 373–96 (383). 34 Dublin Magazine, 1 (January 1820), 27–44 (29), reviewing Ivanhoe. 35 Wolfgang G. Müller, ‘Intertextuality in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels: Some Forms and Functions’, in Anglistentag 1992 Stuttgart: Proceedings (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), 173–85 (178). 36 Marshall Brown, ‘Poetry and the Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, ed. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 107–28 (121–23). 37 The first volume was published in 1722, the second after Nisbet’s death edited by Robert Fleming, in 1742. The Garden elegy is in the Appendix to the second volume on p. 99. In the Abbotsford copy of the second edition, published in two volumes in 1804, the elegy is on p. 93 of the Appendix in the second volume, typographically modernised. Exactly how the abbreviated version in the novel was made is not known. There is no manuscript for this part of the novel. The motto was added at proof stage, James Ballantyne noting in the proof sent to Scott: ‘I went over your Library for an hour, and could not find Nisbet. Please say in what press or compartment it is’.

6 Intertexts

Scott’s great library at Abbotsford includes a full range of literary texts, from the Classical period through to his own time. The ­t wenty-seven novels have more than 10,000 literary references, allusions, or echoes, nearly half of them accounted for by the Bible (over 3000) and Shakespeare (nearly 2000). There are also not far short of 2000 uses of proverbs and over 3000 allusions to works by authors other than Shakespeare and anonymous pieces. These numbers might be considerably expanded were every fleeting reminiscence to be identified.1 If the allusions were evenly spread out there would be one on nine out of ten eewn pages.2 Obviously they are not so distributed. The introductory chapters in several of the novels, when Scott is writing in one of his ‘smart’ styles, 3 are particularly rich in allusions, whereas some chapters consisting entirely of narration have little such material, if any. Most often, even in novels without conspicuously ‘smart’ openings, there is a tendency for allusions to become rather less dense from the second volume on: this is noticeably the case with the first three works, where it is aligned with the increasingly dramatic style noted in the third chapter. The late novels (from The Betrothed on, but anticipated by Quentin Durward) tend to be noticeably less allusive than the earlier ones, perhaps because of a decline in zestfulness, certainly resulting in a more spartan texture. An exception is Woodstock with its plentiful biblical and Shakespearean allusions associated with the Puritans and Sir Henry Lee respectively, giving it an intertextual density that puts it alongside The Antiquary, The Tale of Old Mortality, and The Heart of Mid-Lothian. This chapter will explore the range and extraordinary variety of Scott’s allusions to the Bible and Shakespeare, and his pervasive use of proverbs. It will conclude by examining his handling of a number of authors other than Shakespeare whom he evidently found particularly attractive and useful for his purposes.

1 Most of the biblical allusions and echoes in the Waverley Novels derive from the King James or Authorised Version of 1611 generally used in

Intertexts  117 Scottish churches and homes.4 When deeply moved, characters repeatedly draw on the Bible to express their feelings, whether in moments of unusual stress or in more sustained or habitual situations or relationships. A classic biblical expression of grief at the loss of a close relative is David’s lament for his son Absalom in 2 Samuel 18. Scott uses this several times in the novels, characteristically varying the approach on each occasion. The most straightforward application is to Robert’s reaction to the news of his son Rothsay’s death in The Fair Maid of Perth, though there is a special piquancy arising from his son’s name being David (21: 380.13–14). Sons in danger prompt their fathers to adopt David’s expression: Sir Henry Lee in Woodstock, on Albert’s venturing his life for the King (19: 361.36), and, less specifically, Fairford senior in Redgauntlet, on Alan’s hasty departure from the court (17: 135.39). The words are also used in Peveril of the Peak by Lady Peveril as Julian passes her cell in the Tower (14: 379.18–19), and in The Antiquary the drowned Steenie’s mother translates the lament into Scots: ‘O my bairn, my bairn, my bairn! What for is thou lying there, or what for am I left to greet for ye!’ (3: 250.32–33). As a licensed preacher it is appropriate that Dominie Sampson in Guy Mannering should adopt David’s utterance to lament the presumed death of Harry Bertram (2: 51.1–2); but emotionally he acts as one of the family, as he does again later when, eventually reunited with Harry, he ‘sobbed hysterically, and, at length, in the emphatic language of scripture, lifted up his voice and wept aloud’ (307.33–34: the words ‘lifted up his voice and wept’ are taken from the description of Jacob’s meeting with his cousin Rachel in Genesis). In Woodstock Master Holdenough’s elegising (prematurely, as it turns out) of another presumed death, that of his fellow-student at Cambridge Joseph Albany, begins with an echo of the lament for Absalom but continues with the phrase ‘even as David for Jonathan’ (19: 183.40–41). The reference there is to David’s earlier mourning of his bosom companion in the first chapter of 2 Samuel (‘thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women’). David and Jonathan are movingly involved in their own right in Redgauntlet as a classic example of close male bonding when Darsie Latimer writes to Alan Fairford that ‘however the recollection’ of Greenmantle ‘may haunt my own mind, my love for Alan Fairford surpasses the love of woman’ (17: 113.27–28), and in The Fair Maid of Perth when Conachar laments the loss of his friends in similar terms (21: 385.13–15). Passing biblical allusions are sometimes deployed to signal moments in the novels when, as John Buchan puts it, we are reminded that ‘few can so cunningly darken the stage and make the figures seem no longer men and women, but puppets moving under the hand of the Eternal’.5 The eternal divorce between souls embodied in the ‘great gulf fixed’ between the rich man and Abraham in Luke is echoed in two fraught partings: those of Die and Frank in Rob Roy (5: 285.11), and Rebecca and Rowena

118 Intertexts in Ivanhoe (8: 399.38–39). Oldbuck’s pedantry in The Antiquary is for a moment replaced by something deeper as he recalls Leland’s lamentation over ‘the downfal of the conventual libraries … like Rachael weeping for her children’, echoing Jeremiah and Matthew. It is typical of Scott, though, that he allows Isabella Wardour to suggest that the destruction was a blessing in disguise, preventing antiquarian overload (3: 131.29– 132.14). The same passage is used without any such ensuing qualification in The Tale of Old Mortality of the desolate Church, by the young Covenanting preacher Ephraim Macbriar (4b: 154.5–10), and in The Heart of Mid-Lothian by Effie’s counsel when she cries out in the court at the mention of her child’s possible fate (6: 203.5). A passing allusion can sometimes deepen a character in a moment of self-analysis, as when in The Antiquary Ochiltree is cautioned by a warning against pride from Proverbs: ‘I think having seen a’ the braws yonder, and finding out ane may be happier without them, has made me proud o’ my ain lot – But I wuss it bode me gude, for pride goeth before destruction’ (3: 232.9–12). At the opposite end of the spectrum Scott has no inhibitions about using the Authorised Version for comic effect. St Paul’s ‘outward man’ in 2 Corinthians, good-humoured on its two occurrences in Woodstock (19: 45.36, 99.28), is hilarious in The Tale of Old Mortality as Jenny Dennison, assaulting Cuddie Headrigg with the scalding kail-brose intended for Tom Halliday’s breakfast, ‘conferred upon one admirer’s outward man the viands which her fair hands were preparing for the stomach of another’ (4b: 206.38–40). Grotesquely hilarious too, in Woodstock, is the inclusion in the drunken Wildrake’s good news from London of the annunciation adapted from Isaiah ‘My feet are beautiful on the mountains’ (19: 412.34–35). Biblical allusions are at their most spectacular in the virtuoso streams of texts produced notably by the extreme Covenanters in The Tale of Old Mortality, but also by related characters in other novels such as Bridgenorth in Peveril of the Peak and David Deans in The Heart of Mid-Lothian whose ‘well exercised memory supplied him amply with all the types and tropes of rhetoric peculiar to his sect and cause’ (6: 173.39–41). The erratic Independent Tomkins in Woodstock is less than entirely sober when he bends Scripture to his own philandering ends with perverse ingenuity (19: 325.20–327.26), in contrast with the Presbyterian eloquence of Holdenough in Chapters 9 and 16, Harrison’s crazed apocalypticism in Chapters 13 and 15, and Cromwell’s calculated enthusiasm in Chapters 7, 29, and 32 to 34. Part of the virtuosity in many of these displays involves the fusing or close combination of two texts. David Deans effortlessly combines allusions widely separated in 1 and 2 Samuel in his reference to his namesake David, ‘The man after God’s own heart … [who] washed and anointed himself, and did eat bread’ (6: 132.17–18), the first phrase echoing 1 Samuel 13 and the latter 2 Samuel 12. One of the most prominent combiners of texts is Mause in

Intertexts  119 The Tale of Old Mortality, but she is not always the most accurate: in her expostulation at the beginning of Chapter 17, ‘my bowels are as wine which lacketh vent’, she substitutes the psalmist’s ‘bowels’ for the ‘belly’ in Job, following it up for good measure (and noted by the Author) with ‘sulphur’ for the ‘sapphires’ of Lamentations (4b: 144.38–145.5). Characters often handle Scripture with considerable wit. In her scornful reaction to the soldier in charge of the Covenanting prisoners the same irrepressible Mause elaborates the potsherd of Isaiah with the phrase ‘though it be painted as red as a brick of the Tower of Babel, and ca’ itsel a corporal’ (127.17–19). Caleb Balderstone in The Bride of Lammermoor is equal to Mause in spirit, and more playful, when he inventively characterises his exchange of the gunpowder formerly stored at Wolf’s Crag ‘with the skippers o’ Dutch luggers and French vessels, for gin and brandy’, enlisting the psalmist’s ‘wine that maketh glad the heart of man’, as ‘a gude swap too, between what cheereth the soul of man and that which dingeth it clean out of the body’ (7a: 214.31–34). One may compare Cromwell’s slightly tortured play in Woodstock. When Wildrake tells him of the architectural complexity of Woodstock, the Protector judges that it provides ‘places for concealing priests unquestionably …. It is seldom that such ancient houses lack secret stalls wherein to mew up these calves of Bethel’ (19: 90.8–10). He is invoking 1 Kings, where Jeroboam sacrificed ‘unto the calves that he had made: and he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places which he had made’. Some scriptural allusions are likely to produce shivers down the reader’s spine rather than a cool appreciation of their wit. In The Bride of Lammermoor there is extreme bitterness in Edgar’s reworking of Ruth’s moving expression of loyalty to Naomi as a vow of vengeance on the usurping Ashton: ‘Heaven do as much to me and more, if I requite not to this man and his house the ruin and disgrace he has brought on me and mine’ (7a: 21.3–4). There is a brutal perversity in Julian Avenel’s assertion in The Monastery, echoing Acts, that ‘it is our profession to turn the world upside down, and we live ever the blithest life when the downer side is uppermost’ (9: 224.35–37). And in Ivanhoe there is a fearsome ingenuity in Bois-Guilbert’s novel reading of the divine ‘Vengeance is mine’ in Romans as ‘revenge is a feast for the gods! And if they have reserved it, as priests tell us, to themselves, it is because they hold it an enjoyment too precious for the possession of mere mortals’ (8: 201.14–17). In a terrifying moment towards the end of Peveril of the Peak, as Bridgewater’s mind succumbs to ‘insane enthusiasm’ he has a densely allusive speech whose surreal quality reaches its climax with the sentence ‘The furrows … must be drawn long and deep, and watered by the blood of the mighty’ (14: 440.23–30). This is a chilling parody of one of the most genial verses in the Psalms: ‘Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly: thou settlest the furrows thereof: thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the springing thereof’.

120 Intertexts On several occasions an Old Testament allusion is made largely, if not entirely, for the sake of a resonant name. In Woodstock, Harrison refers to ‘the pipes of Jezer’ (19: 152.34): since Jezer has no pipes in Genesis, Numbers, or 1 Chronicles his introduction must be down to his unusual name, as with Harrison’s earlier invoking of Zerobabel in Haggai (146.24). In The Tale of Old Mortality Balfour says that Morton is ‘yet in the dungeon-house of the Law, a pit darker than that into which Jeremiah was plunged, even the dungeon of Malcaiah the son of Hamelmelech, where there was no water but mire’ (4b: 43.22–25). Cuddie notes this Covenanting addiction to sonorous names when he recalls Kettledrummle urging his hearers to go down ‘to the battle to Ramoth Gilead’, which Cuddie takes to be a real place, though ‘there’s nae place in this country they ca’ Roman Gilead – it will be some gate in the west moorlands’ (121.22–27). Later in the novel, Meiklewrath shows himself (and Scott) to be aware of the meaning of such a name: his designation ‘is changed to Magor-Missabib, because I am made a terror unto myself and unto all that are around me’ (181.37–38). The same is true in Woodstock of Tomkins, whose ‘wild sermon’ in Woodstock comes to a resounding conclusion, drawing on Isaiah, with ‘for he is coming hither who shall be called Maher-shalal-hash-baz, because he maketh haste to the spoil’ (19: 16.21–23). Overwhelmingly both Author and characters in the Waverley Novels quote or echo the Authorised (King James) Version of 1611. But Scott was acquainted with several other translations, most notably the Latin Vulgate and (for the Psalms) the Book of Common Prayer. It is not surprising that in the medieval novels there are quotations from the Vulgate, but, Scott being Scott, the Latin quotations are not always quite what they seem. In Ivanhoe Prior Aymer’s letter to Bois-Guilbert cites two texts from the Psalms in close proximity (8: 310.21–22). The first, ‘Vinum laetificat cor hominis’, comes straight from the Vulgate, but the second, ‘Rex delectabitur pulchritudine tua’, is a paraphrase of ‘Et concupiscet rex decorem tuum’, apparently Scott’s own, influenced by the Authorised Version’s ‘So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty’. There is a similar case in Redgauntlet, set much closer to Scott’s own time, where Sister Angelica’s breviary says of the devil ‘incedit sicut leo vorans’ (17: 272.10–11). The Vulgate has ‘leo rugiens’ in 1 Peter 5.8, corresponding to the 1611 ‘roaring lion’: Scott omits the roaring but takes up the devouring (as ‘vorans’) from the end of the verse (‘quærens quem devoret’, or ‘seeking whom he may devour’ in 1611). Although brought up Presbyterian, and ordained as an elder in the established Church of Scotland, Scott was a practising Episcopalian for much of his life, and he occasionally draws on the translation of the Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer rather than the King James version. The allocation of these allusions is sometimes surprising. The Presbyterian Lady Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor, writing to the

Intertexts  121 Episcopalian Ravenswood, quotes the Prayer Book version of Psalm 37.36, but with the 1611 ‘wicked’ for ‘ungodly’ (7a: 222.32–33: the verse is numbered 35 in the Authorised Version). This is probably Scott’s unconscious fusion rather than a point of great subtlety. That staunchest of Presbyterians David Deans in The Heart of Mid-Lothian refers to marriage as ‘an honourable state’ (6: 381.37). In the Authorised Version Hebrews 13.4 has ‘Marriage is honourable in all’: ‘honourable estate’ is from the opening of ‘The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony’ in the Prayer Book. The truth is probably that Scott was so steeped in the Prayer Book that in his thirty-five-odd allusions he often used it indiscriminately for characters of different persuasions. At times, though, he was undoubtedly aware of the implications of Prayer Book usage. It is telling that towards the end of The Heart of Mid-Lothian David’s transformed daughter Effie should talk of the necessity of following her English husband ‘for better for worse’ (409.24), and an Episcopalian liturgical sensitivity is evident when Oxford expresses his disapproval of Campo-Basso in Anne of Geierstein by parodying Psalm 85’s ‘Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other’ (22: 394.36–37), particularly effective since the words are traditionally associated with Advent and the concluding action of the novel takes place during the Christmas season.6 Graham Tulloch has suggested that on one occasion in Ivanhoe (8: 210.39) Scott’s familiarity with the Prayer Book may have influenced the form of a quotation from the Vulgate: the abbreviated version ‘cor meum eructavit’ with its misleading translation perhaps derives from those three words standing alone at the head of Psalm 45 there.7 There are occasional hints of Scott’s acquaintance with, or interest in, less familiar Bible translations. When Effie Deans says she thought her seducer Robertson’s heart was ‘as hard as the nether millstane’ (6: 186.41) she is lightly Scoticising the phrase from Job in the Geneva Bible where 1611 has ‘as hard as a piece of the nether millstone’. Scott was fond of a standard gloss on Luther’s translation of Psalm 148.2 which appears twice in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose as ‘Alle gute geister loben den Herrn’ (7b: 38.32–33, 101.21–22), and in translation in the story of Martin Waldeck in The Antiquary (3: 141.12). A footnote in The Monastery presents as fact the occurrence of the term ‘knave’ for ‘servant’ in an early translation of the Bible, though it is actually doubted by Scott’s presumed source, Robert Nares’s Glossary in the Abbotsford library (9: 124.38–41). Scott was au fait with some nice points of debate among biblical commentators. In Woodstock he has Dr Rochecliffe, referring to Proverbs 31.10, observe that Alice is ‘one of those whose price is above rubies – not that rubies is the proper translation’: ‘rubies’ is the 1611 translation, Geneva and Coverdale preferring ‘pearls’ (19: 297.8–9). He adopts the unusual term Gehennah for Hinnom in The Heart of Mid-Lothian

122 Intertexts (6:  355.7) and an alternative Herodias (the daughter of Herod rather than his wife) in Peveril of the Peak (14: 120.33). Four allusions to Isaiah 26.4 use the marginal reading popular in the eighteenth century ‘the rock of ages’ in preference to the main 1611 text’s ‘everlasting strength’.8 One of the most striking features of the pervasive influence of the King James Bible on the Waverley Novels is the repeated occurrence of certain favourite expressions, most of which had acquired proverbial status by Scott’s time: from the Old Testament ‘Moabitish woman’, ‘sons of Belial’, ‘thy (their) blood be upon thy head (their heads)’, ‘avenger of blood’, ‘hewers of wood’, ‘howling wilderness’, ‘smite hip and thigh’, and ‘Saul among the prophets’; and from the New Testament ‘filthy lucre’ and ‘the good fight’. There are a host of other expressions that have become proverbial. The synoptic gospels alone are the ultimate source of twenty of them: ‘generation of vipers’ and ‘the wrath to come’, ‘the mammon of unrighteousness’ and ‘serve two masters’, ‘sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’, ‘cast pearls before swine’, ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’, ‘building on sand’, ‘shake dust from feet’, ‘wise as serpents and harmless as doves’, ‘he that is not with me is against me’, ‘tares among wheat’, ‘the leaven of the Pharisees’, ‘labourers in the vineyard’,  ‘den of thieves’, ‘whited sepulchres’, ‘marrying or giving in marriage’, ‘hidden talents’, ‘all they that take the sword will perish with the sword’, and ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’. A table indicating the frequency of references to books of the Bible, based on the relevant listing in the website referred to at the end of the Prefatory Notes, is headed by two untypical entries: there are more than 300 allusions to Matthew’s gospel, but this includes passages also found in the other two synoptic gospels, and there is a similar number of references to the Psalms. There follow, with between 200 and 100 citations, Genesis, Isaiah, Luke, Exodus, Revelation, Proverbs, and 1 Samuel.9 Two books, Genesis and Job, have been selected for consideration here because of the peculiar richness of their pervasive contributions to the series.10 Genesis is the source of a number of characters, incidents, and associated phrases that have become proverbial and recur repeatedly in the Waverley Novels: the expulsion from paradise; Cain as proto-­fratricide; Methuselah for longevity; Nimrod for hunters; Babel for linguistic confusion; Esau’s ‘mess of pottage’; Goshen for pastoral prosperity; Reuben ‘unstable as water’; Issachar as ‘a strong ass couching down between two burdens’. The fundamental dignity of humankind can be conceived to be founded on God’s words ‘Let us make man in our image’ at Genesis 1.26. We find them invoked by Butler in The Heart of Mid-­ Lothian when trying in vain to dissuade the self-­appointed executioners of Porteus (6: 62.3–4), by Warden in The Monastery rebuking Halbert for (apparently) having killed Piercie Shafton (9: 209.41–210.1), and by Rebecca in Ivanhoe and Magdalen Graeme and the Author in The Abbot lamenting the defacing of God’s image in battle (8: 247.21–22;

Intertexts  123 10: 17.10–11, 363.13–14). There are two further allusions to man as God’s image in Anne of Geierstein, where Arthur, confronted by the vulture, fears he may have ‘already lost the dignity of humanity, the awe which the being formed in the image of his Maker, inspires into all inferior creatures’, and Arnold Biederman asserts that Philipson senior should be assisted because he is ‘a copy of the common Creator’s image’ (22: 22.36–38, 166.12). It would have been possible for Scott to use Genesis 2.7, with God breathing into man’s ‘nostrils the breath of life’, to similar purpose, but he handles it with ambiguous effect. In Kenilworth Amy Robsart takes the phrase in a positive sense in her appeal to Leicester’s better nature: ‘Be like a true English gentleman, knight, and earl, who holds that truth is the foundation of honour, and that honour is dear to him as the breath of his nostrils’ (11: 332.27–30), and Ivanhoe maintains to Rebecca that ‘the dust of the mellay is the breath of our nostrils’ (8: 249.7–8), a sentiment closely related to that ascribed by the Author to King Richard in The Talisman (18b: 74.39–40). But these last two usages are disturbingly not very far from the criticism of the Crusaders by Nicephorus and Alexius in Count Robert of Paris, the breath of their nostrils being ‘the strife of combat’ and ‘the insane desire of witnessing feats of battle and single combat’ (23a: 69.13–14, 313.22–23), or from Bois-Guilbert’s telling Rebecca in Ivanhoe that if he doesn’t appear in the lists he will ‘lose that which is the breath of my nostrils, the esteem, I mean, in which I am held by my brethren’ (8: 341.30–31). And these in turn are not a thousand miles removed from the breath of Dwining’s nostrils being ‘the hope of revenge’ in The Fair Maid of Perth (21: 166.38). No wonder that in Saint Ronan’s Well Captain MacTurk’s ‘every man’s honour is the breath of his nostrils – Cot tamn!’ is robustly rejected by Touchwood (16: 324.11–12), and that the Quaker Joshua Geddes and his daughter echo a related text in Isaiah to the same effect in Redgauntlet (17: 44.8–9, 62.4–7). There is little ambiguity in the almost invariable use of Adam’s ‘bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh’ (2.23) for the deepest feelings of kinship: between Ranald MacEagh and his three executed sons in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (7b: 101.3), Effie Deans and her baby in The Heart of Mid-Lothian (6: 187.32), Isaac and Rebecca in Ivanhoe (8: 336.19–20), Mordaunt Mertoun and his parents in The Pirate (12: 307.37, 381.41), and Irene and Anna Comnena in Count Robert of Paris (23a: 279.41–42). One exception, verging on the ironic, is the Authorial mention in Saint Ronan’s Well of Lady Binks becoming ‘bone of his bone’ with her husband (16: 50.34–40). The four references to Lot’s wife are all comic, or semi-comic, comparisons between the retrospective lady of Genesis and Mysie’s palfrey in The Monastery (9: 269.23–25), Lady Avenel on Roland’s departure in The Abbot (10: 49.5–7), Goldthread’s stranded fiancée in Kenilworth (11: 240.41–241.2), and the dull wife envisaged by Dalgarno for Nigel in The Fortunes of Nigel (13: 126.15–22). But a corresponding quartet of allusions to Abraham’s

124 Intertexts interrupted sacrifice of Isaac are deeply serious and subtly varied: in The Tale of Old Mortality Meiklewrath chillingly welcomes Morton’s arrival with a characteristic set of biblical phrases including the words ‘he is a ram caught in the thicket, whose blood shall be a drink-offering to redeem vengeance from the church’ (4b: 261.30–31); Magdalen Græme’s co-­religionist in The Abbot welcomes the sacrifice of Roland to the Cause in terms not wholly dissimilar, though accompanied with ‘a mournful aspect of compassion’ (10: 76.31–39); in Quentin Durward Louis asks Comines in the most disconcerting terms to think of some sacrifice more acceptable to Charles than his long-cherished union between Orleans and Joan, ‘some ram to be offered up instead of that which is dear to me as the Patriarch’s only son was to him’ (15: 333.15–16); and in Peveril of the Peak Alice cites the passage in Genesis to argue severely that the Cause espoused by her father requires an absoluteness of faithful obedience beyond Julian’s scope (14: 173.35–174.3). The book of Job furnishes a number of solemn passages for quotation in extremis. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian Effie’s bible is turned down at an ‘impressive text’ expressive of her ruin (6: 186.5–23). That is a unique reference. More frequently invoked is ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’, expressive of ultimate resignation. It is used thus in The Tale of Old Mortality by Bessie Maclure thinking of her sons dead in the Covenanting cause (4b: 328.1–2). David Deans employs it more summarily in parenthesis in The Heart of Mid-­ Lothian, as a reflex reaction to his mention of the death of Reuben Butler’s father and grandfather (6: 78.22–23). In A Legend of the Wars of Montrose the clergyman at Ardenvohr cites it to console Lady Campbell (7b: 84.40–42), and in The Surgeon’s Daughter Hartley’s similar comforting of Mrs Witherington leads her husband to commend his ability to ‘comfort the sick in spirit, as well as the sick in body’, firmly establishing his moral stature (20: 223.37–224.1). Final peace, in the world of the dead or the unborn, is where ‘the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest’. Such a thought is typically inspired by a cemetery, as with Frank Osbaldistone at Glasgow in Rob Roy (5: 157.12–13), but two further references to the sentiment contrast with this conventional reaction. In Woodstock Rochecliffe reacts to Sir Henry Lee’s wish that he might be permitted ‘to enjoy my son’s company in quiet but for a day’ with the grimly witty ‘The quiet which depends on the wicked ceasing from troubling … is counted, not by days and hours, but by minutes’ (19: 343.38–344.1). The wit is even grimmer in The Fair Maid of Perth when Rothsay considers, in a masterly circumbendibus, what might be an appropriate end for the King if he were to abdicate: And our father and predecessor, … will he continue to live to pray for us, as our beadsman, by whose favour he holds the privilege of laying his grey hairs in the grave as soon, and no earlier, than the

Intertexts  125 course of nature permits? – or must he also encounter some of those negligences, in consequence of which men cease to continue to live, and exchange the limits of a prison, or of a convent resembling one, for the dark and tranquil cell where the priests say that the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest? (21: 191.41–192.5) An obscure phrase in Job, ‘the root of the matter’, came to be applied by extreme Protestants to a possession of the essentials of the faith. Donald Bean Lean mimics the required jargon when addressing Gilfillan in Waverley (1: 186.30), and it comes into its own with the Deans family in The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Jeanie acknowledges that the Rector preached ‘the root of the matter’ (6: 287.11). She will have learned the usage from her father, and in a letter to Butler she recalls him saying that the root of the matter was to be found ‘mair deeply hafted in that wee murland parish [Skreegh-me-dead] than in the Canno’gate of Edinburgh’ (351.35–39). David acknowledges that Reuben has it and that ‘as ministers gang now, where ye’ll find ane better, ye’ll find ten waur than’ him (382.42–383.2), and a few pages later he is ‘in his element’ advising the young minister ‘to gang to the root o’ the matter’ if he should be offered a charge in the established Church (387.34–40). There is evidently an element of amusement in the Author’s attitude to ‘the root of the matter’: this comes out more obviously in The Pirate in the jaunty account of a similar dilemma facing Triptolemus Yellowley as a potential minister and his uncompromisingly Presbyterian mother (12: 34.26–35.5). Scott’s favourite passage in Job, attracting nine allusions, is Chapter 39 with its vivid battle imagery. Few of them are as straightforward as the reference to Bothwell in The Tale of Old Mortality ‘who, like the warhorse of scripture, snuffed the battle afar off’ (4b: 105.38–39). It is natural that Rebecca in Ivanhoe should use ‘the sacred text’, ‘half whispering to herself, half speaking to her companion’ as preparations are heard for the attack on Torquilstone, while ‘Ivanhoe was like the war-horse of that sublime passage, glowing with impatience at his inactivity, and with his ardent desire to mingle in the affray’ (8: 243.12–17). But in The Antiquary the tone is comic, as Oldbuck ‘starting like a war-horse at the trumpet sound, plunged himself at once into the various arguments for and against the date of 1273’ (3: 149.7–9), and the same is true of the lawyers scenting a profitable case at the opening of The Heart of Mid-Lothian (6: 18.7–11). In two of the later novels there is no humour in the reference, but rather an implied excess, as Redgauntlet expects Darsie to respond to his summons like the war-horse (17: 316.41–317.2), and as in Anne of Geierstein Campo-Basso reworks Job in manic lust for battle (22: 383.31–34). Job provides one of the most telling of all the biblical allusions in the novels. In Rob Roy Morris pleads fruitlessly for his life in terms generally reminiscent of Satan’s words in Job 2.4, ‘Skin for skin, yea, all that

126 Intertexts a man hath will he give for his life’. The actual words are quoted two pages later when Baillie Jarvie puts a rational and mostly altruistic case for the sparing of his own life but finally resorts to the ultimate plea poured out by Morris (5: 266.24–25, 268.7–14).

2 Scott’s immense admiration for Shakespeare is well known. The classic statement, linking him with Burns, occurs in his Journal entry for 11 December 1826: ‘Long life to thy fame and peace to thy soul, Rob Burns. When I want to express a sentiment which I feel strongly, I find the phrase in Shakespeare or thee. The blockheads talk of my being like Shakespeare – not fit to tie his brogues’.11 When Francis Chantrey’s fine bust of Scott arrived at Abbotsford in 1828 the author dismissed the idea of placing it in the niche in the library occupied by a plaster cast of Shakespeare’s bust, though the substitution was effected after his death, and as the frontispiece shows the two writers now face each other across the entrance to the study.12 Allusions to Shakespeare, it has to be said, far outnumber those to Burns (1900 as against eighty). The densest of the novels in this respect are Kenilworth, where Shakespeare himself appears, and Woodstock, where Sir Henry Lee quotes his plays incessantly. They are closely followed by: The Antiquary, where Oldbuck has many witty bardic allusions; Saint Ronan’s Well with its dramatics; Waverley, where a Shakespearean nexus connects the Mac-Ivors, Talbot, the hero, and the Author; and Guy Mannering, where more than a third of the chapter mottoes are taken from the plays.13 Nicola J. Watson has a succinct summary of the ways Shakespeare functions in Scott’s fiction: As a body, the Waverley novels pervasively summon Shakespeare in a remarkable number of ways and at a variety of levels, sometime explicitly, sometimes silently: by quotation and reference in the multiple paratexts of introductions, notes, and epigraphs that characterize the Waverley novels; by echo, allusion, and quotation within the main text, whether deployed by the narrative voice or within a character’s idiolect and inner consciousness; by the rethinking and recasting of Shakespearean character, scenes, and plots, or more generally by the deployment of a ‘Shakespearean’ aesthetic of multiple plots which comment upon and interconnect with one another.14 On the simplest level Shakespeare is invoked as giving memorable expression to particular situations or aspects of human behaviour. The allusions are generally serious in tone. There is complete earnestness in the invoking of Richard II on several occasions as an archetype for weakness in rulers or potential rulers. When Waverley observes on the march into England that ‘in those towns in which they proclaimed James the

Intertexts  127 Third, “no man cried, God bless him”’ (1: 281.4–6), the phrase originally applied to Richard on the way out is transferred to James III hoping (vainly) to come in. Louis XI’s ‘ague-fits of superstitious devotion’ in Quentin Durward recall Richard’s ‘ague-fit of fear’ (15: 148.36–40), and the English king’s distrust of Bolingbroke’s show of subservience in the next scene is used as a motto for Chapter 32 where Charles of Burgundy makes a similar calculated display of courtesy (348.27–31). It is inevitable that Richard’s abdication should provide the motto for the chapter in Anne of Geierstein where King René of Provence follows the same path (22: 348.34–38), and in the highly charged theatrical atmosphere of Saint Ronan’s Well it is appropriate that the second chapter to be devoted to Etherington’s letter to Captain Jekyl should be headed with Richard’s ‘Must I then ravel out | My weaved-up follies?’ (16: 236.21–22). Considerable earnestness is evident, too, in recollections of the tempestuous and dizzy storm and ‘cliff’ scenes in King Lear. In The Pirate ‘“the dreadful trade of the samphire-gatherer”’ and the ‘giddy cliffs’ are enough to convey the appropriate atmosphere (12: 17.18–20). In The Antiquary the motto to Chapter 8, beginning ‘There is a cliff’ has a similar effect (3: 61.22–26), soon augmented by another classic cliff overtone from Hamlet in the single word ‘beetling’ (62.42); but Oldbuck’s ‘this is a naughty night to swim in’ (64.9–10) comes when the rescues are almost complete, nicely balancing a reinforcement of the Lear opening with a half- or quarter-jocular relieving of tension. The two Henry IV plays, which Arthur Melville Clark has suggested may with their ‘lacing of history with fiction’ have ‘provided the general model for the Waverley Novels’,15 are laid under contribution for tavern scenes and highway robbery,16 and for ‘deep and dangerous’ rebellion.17 Hamlet is a source of standard funeral and graveyard Gothic-gloom atmosphere: in The ­Antiquary Lady Glenallan responded to the old countess’s death by causing ‘many of the apartments … be hung with the exterior trappings of woe’ (3: 226.6–7), and in The Bride of Lammermoor the motto from the graveyard scene (7a: 194.23–29), establishing the tone for the ensuing discussion between Edgar and the sexton, completes a series of allusions to the tragedy set in train by Lord Ravenswood’s funeral in the second chapter. Also essentially serious, but with various degrees of ironic overtone, are a number of chapter mottoes with references to Shakespeare’s characterisations of stages in human life: in Guy Mannering Julia and Matilda echo the youthful companionship of Hermia and Helena from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2: 155.32–39); Morton’s jealousy in love in The Tale of Old Mortality is headed by the potentially comic (at least partly ironic) perfunctoriness of ‘O, my Lord, beware of jealousy’ from Othello (4b: 109.21–22); and the appointment of Godfrey Bertram as Justice of the Peace in Guy Mannering is signalled by a motto consisting of the appropriate item from the seven ages of man speech in As You Like It. Shakespeare’s dignity here contrasts with Bertram’s illiberality,

128 Intertexts and his natural stage of life with personal desire and consequent political machination (2: 30.23–27). Complex sets of archetypical allusion occur in three novels published between 1818 and 1820 when a particular play is accorded unusual thematic prominence: Measure for Measure in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Hamlet in The Bride of Lammermoor, and The Merchant of Venice in Ivanhoe.18 Less frequently Shakespearean archetypes are more lightly handled. The gardeners from Richard II, invoked in Waverley for Duncan Macwheeble so occupied, combine rooted tradition and a degree of amusement at the application to the butler (1: 42.6). In the same novel the citation of domestic violence from Twelfth Night for the combat between Bradwardine and Balmawhapple (53.27–31) defuses any real seriousness. Almost wholly comic (though psychologically illuminating) is the parallel in The Antiquary between Isabella Wardour’s ‘distracted feelings’ and those of Macbeth in rather different circumstances (3: 181.34–40). Sometimes Scott makes the closeness of Shakespeare’s classic characterisations to proverbial gnomic wisdom very evident. (Shakespeare’s own works are, of course, replete with proverbs.) In Peveril of the Peak the motto to Chapter 12 consists of Lysander’s lament from A Midsummer Night’s Dream ending ‘The course of true love never did run smooth!’. The Author immediately takes this up to lead into his own gnomic reflection on the subject: The celebrated passage which we have prefixed to this chapter, has, like most observations of the same author, its foundation in real experience. The period at which love is felt most strongly is seldom that at which there is much prospect of its being brought to a happy issue. (14: 118.10–26) Nigel’s words to Buckingham in The Fortunes of Nigel ‘an open enemy is better than a hollow friend’ are a conflation of the proverb ‘Better an open enemy than a false friend’ and a line from 3 Henry VI ‘I rather wish you foes than hollow friends’ (13: 117.29–30). Similarly, in The Bride of Lammermoor, Caleb’s complaint about being ‘an auld dog’ combines a reminiscence of Adam in As You Like It and the proverbial being too old a dog to learn new tricks (7a: 212.15–18). On the deepest level, beyond the standard archetypical, Shakespeare (like the Bible) is invoked for some of the most profound sentiments in the novels. When, on his way to his execution in Waverley, Fergus anticipates the placing of his head over the town gate at Carlisle and hopes they will choose ‘the Scotch gate’, he alludes to Margaret’s crowning York with a paper coronet before ordering his beheading and the placing of his head ‘on York gates’ in 3 Henry VI: ‘they have not the wit to grace mine with a paper coronet; there would be some satire in that,

Intertexts  129 Edward’ (1: 348.41–42). In The Tale of Old Mortality Henry Morton expresses, and perhaps relieves, his feelings as his dog initially fails to recognise him on his return from abroad with Lear’s ‘The little dogs and all!’ (4b: 315.4). When the time came for Scott himself to take a final farewell of his readers, it was to Shakespeare he turned, first in the wittily transferred but apocalyptic vision of Count Robert of Paris coming ‘before the public like the elder Hamlet before his last judge, “With all its imperfections on its head”’ (23a: 365.11–14), and then in a pathetic bowing out at the end of the Introductory Address to the fourth series of Tales of my Landlord: ‘In the meanwhile, I offer my thanks in my own character; and, like poor Kent, I lose, in the feelings of the moment, the power of maintaining my part of the masquerade. “I cannot daub it further”’ (23b: 208.23–25). Contrariwise, again as with the Bible, no passage in Shakespeare is too solemn to escape affectionate jocularity: in The Antiquary Oldbuck has fun with Lear’s ‘Prithee, undo this button’ (3: 85.6) and the Author with the presumed desire of Mrs Shortcake, friend of Mrs Mailsetter in the Fairport post office, echoing Hamlet, ‘that the too, too solid wax [sealing a letter] would melt and dissolve itself’ (113.5–7). Scott was intimately familiar with the whole Shakespearean corpus, and there are occasions where only a handful of his readers are likely to recognise and respond to allusions to less familiar passages. The eewn had the immense advantage of having as one of its advisers a preeminent expert in Elizabethan drama, T. W. Craik, who picked up many echoes that would have eluded the volume editors without his generous help. A case in point is when the tenement Mannering and Dinmont enter in Guy Mannering receives from the adjoining close ‘a villainous compound of smells’ (2: 203.25), echoing Falstaff’s description of the laundry basket in The Merry Wives of Windsor in which ‘there was the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril’. Another is when the Author smiles at Butler’s pedantry in The Heart of Mid-Lothian: he ‘was apt, on many occasions, to make parade of his knowledge, when there was no need of such vanity’ (6: 80.4–6). Not many readers will spot that the last words are those of Dogberry who advises the second Watch in Much Ado about Nothing ‘for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity’. Similarly, though almost every reader will appreciate the motto at the beginning of Chapter 28 of Count Robert of Paris, where the doctor’s reference to Lear’s recovery prepares for Ursel’s release from the dungeon (23a: 287.2–7), fewer will recognise the reinforcing echo at 289.29–31, where the ‘musty pile of straw’ is exchanged for ‘a couch of the softest down’, with its allusion to the ‘short and musty straw’ on which Cordelia says (earlier in the scene) her father has been forced to sleep. On one occasion, in Redgauntlet, Scott teases the less expert reader by beginning a quotation and leaving them to complete it (17: 234.11–12). The passage,

130 Intertexts from The Comedy of Errors, is not well known, and the quoted part (‘A drop, | That in the ocean seeks another drop, &c.’) makes imperfect sense without the lines that follow: Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself. So I, to find a mother and a brother, In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself. Allusions which are mere passing hints can often add a significant resonance, not just a sense of satisfaction, for the reader who picks them up. Witness The Bride of Lammermoor where Old Alice is briefly associated with the supernatural in Macbeth by the use of the expression ‘harped aright’, anticipating reported accusations of witchcraft against her (7a: 35.28–36.1, 151.12–18). In A Legend of the Wars of Montrose Dalgetty’s reference to ‘disciplines of war’ (7b: 23.1–2) may recall Fluellen’s catchphrase in Henry V and transfer something of the Welsh character to his Scottish counterpart. When Dorothy sees Catherine in The Fair Maid of Perth as ‘a figure like an angel, who came wandering by her with wild eye, cheek deadly pale, hair dishevelled’ (21: 200.34–35) the weirdness is augmented for the knowledgeable reader by the close match with Clarence’s description of the ghost of Prince Edward in Richard III: ‘Then came wand’ring by | A shadow like an angel, with bright hair | Dabbled in blood’. The merest hint of an echo of Macbeth’s imagined dagger ‘sensible | To feeling as to sight’ gives a ghostly frisson to Anne’s hand, ‘sensible to touch as to sight’, appearing to support Arthur in Anne of Geierstein (22: 156.1–2), and a similar effect is produced a few pages later where the deputies gather round the shrine of St Magnus ‘in which the sainted hero stood, armed as when he lived’, recalling the ghost of Hamlet’s father (179.1–3). Some of the more explicit or readily recognisable Shakespeare allusions and echoes serve to deepen the characterisation. Flora and Fergus in Waverley resemble Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night as played by Harriet Siddons and her brother, reinforcing the tendency of both the Mac-Ivors to self-dramatisation (1: 106.39–107.3).19 Flora briefly plays the role of Beatrice to Waverley’s Benedick as she teasingly discounts his offer to be best man at her brother’s wedding (to the Cause, as she informs him: 136.38–137.3). The negative side of Colonel Talbot is augmented when he denigrates the Highlanders by echoing (whether intentionally or not is unclear) the dismissal of the mob by Marcius in Coriolanus (279.17–20): a couple of pages later the Author alludes to the same sentiments as expressed by Coriolanus himself (281.9), conveying a distrust of popular fickleness that may be shared by Waverley. The effect of Meg’s celebrated ‘Ride your ways’ speech in Guy Mannering is enhanced by her concluding gesture (2: 44.27–30), reminiscent of

Intertexts  131 Margaret of Anjou in Richard III, and anticipating the appearance of Margaret as a character imbued with tragic dignity in Anne of Geierstein. A more disturbing dimension is suggested when Brown associates Meg with Lady Macbeth later in the novel: He endeavoured to read in her withered and dark countenance, as the lamp threw its light upon her features, something that promised those feelings of compassion, which women, even in their most degraded state, can seldom altogether smother. There was no such touch of humanity about this woman. The interest, whatever it was, that determined her in his favour, arose not from the impulse of compassion, but from some internal, and probably capricious, association of feelings, to which he had no clew. It rested, perhaps, on a fancied likeness, such as Lady Macbeth found to her father in the sleeping monarch. Such were the reflections that passed in rapid succession through Brown’s mind, as he gazed from his hiding-place upon this extraordinary personage. (146.34–147.2) Lady Macbeth is also enlisted for the presentation of Lady Lochleven in The Abbot. When she exclaims of Mary Queen of Scots ‘Dying, and in my castle!’ (10: 298.39) not only is she presented as another neurotic domestic control freak, but a hoard of sinister castle overtones is unlocked. On at least two occasions Shakespearean allusions may have homosocial overtones. When Bucklaw shocks Craigengelt in The Bride of Lammermoor by announcing his intention to marry he asks, echoing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, together with Milton’s Samson Agonistes, ‘wherefore droops thy mighty spirit, and why grow the rubies on thy cheek so pale?’ (7a: 169.3–4). 20 And in Redgauntlet Darsie writes to Alan in his journal: ‘no wonder that, knowing thy friendship and faith, thy sound sagacity and persevering disposition, “my bosom’s lord should now sit lightly in his throne”’, recalling Romeo’s dream of being restored from the dead by Juliet’s kisses (17: 177.40–42). 21 Some of Scott’s characters find Shakespeare helpful in analysing themselves. Looking back, Frank in Rob Roy recognises how his actions during his growing acquaintance with Die Vernon, ‘like Benedick’s brushing his hat of a morning, were signs that the sweet youth was in love’ in Much Ado about Nothing (5: 129.36–37), and in The Heart of Mid-Lothian Robertson/Staunton uses a parallel with Prince Hal as described by Bolingbroke in Richard II to come to terms with his own dissolute past (6: 299.31–34). On one occasion at least the Shakespearean parallel may be ‘not an aid to self-understanding but a defense against self-analysis’, as Jane Millgate suggests in her discussion of Guy Mannering’s seeing himself in terms of Othello, though his statement that he never dares to open the play makes it clear that at least we are not dealing in the superficial here. 22

132 Intertexts Scott was interested in textual and interpretative issues raised by Shakespeare’s works. In Waverley the young hero loved to ‘“chew the cud of sweet and bitter fancy”’ (1: 19.33–34), the quotation coming from As You Like It. The eewn note reads (530): Apparently all editions of Shakespeare up to Scott’s day read here ‘food of sweet and bitter fancy’, with Howard Staunton in his 1859 edition being first to emend ‘food’ to ‘cud’ (with its enhanced image of ruminating mentally). Either Scott adjusted the quotation spontaneously, or he is silently amused at the failure of previous editors to make what he considered an obvious emendation. The same words are entertainingly (though unwittingly) varied by the Marquis in the Introduction to Quentin Durward as ‘Shewing the code of sweet and bitter fancy’ (15: 13.26). Scott seems to have suggested another later nineteenth-century emendation, of ‘cars’ to ‘cords’, rather than Trywhitt’s ‘cables’, in Twelfth Night, with the expression ‘were it drawn from thee with cords’ given to Sir Henry Lee in Woodstock (19: 211.36). When in Ivanhoe Locksley has a variant of a phrase from King Lear, ‘whether I can draw a bow as well or better than a cowkeeper’, Scott will most likely have derived the unusual reading of ‘cowkeeper’ for ‘crow-keeper’ (scarecrow) from the apparatus to the 1803 variorum (revised by Isaac Reed) in his library, where the authority given is Pope’s edition. 23 He will have found in the same apparatus Johnson’s somewhat unlikely interpretation of ‘an eye of death’ in 1 Henry IV as ‘an eye menacing death’ rather than an expression of mortal fear: the Johnsonian sense is required in The Talisman.24 A masque involving mermaids in The Pirate gives Scott an opportunity to allude with much amusement to the extensive textual debate on the attendants likened to mermaids in Antony and Cleopatra, who ‘made their bends adornings’, and in particular to the suggestion that ‘bends’ should be emended to ‘ends’ (12: 144.34–145.2). The variorum edition also enables him to have Oldbuck in The Antiquary give alternative etymologies for ‘tilley-valley’ (3: 42.22–24). 25 It seems likely too that a comment by Edmund Malone reproduced in the variorum played a part in the choice of the motto to Chapter 32 of The Abbot (10: 297.31–36), where Drydesdale informs Lady Lochleven that he has (as he thinks) poisoned Mary. Malone said of the passage from King John: ‘It is extremely probable that our author meant to pay his court to Elizabeth by this covert apology for her conduct to Mary’ (Reed, 10.482). It can sometimes be difficult to know how far the identification of Scott’s echoings of Shakespeare should be pressed. A case in point occurs in The Tale of Old Mortality, with the Authorial expression ‘huge feeder’ when Milnewood is upset by Cuddie’s inroads into his larder (4b: 61.40). This is taken from The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock

Intertexts  133 complains about Lancelot Gobbo’s appetite. Once the allusion has been spotted (it slipped through the eewn procedures), there is a clear link between two misers similarly disconcerted. In a very useful article Robert K. Gordon spots the allusion, and suggests a whole set of parallels: Both Milnwood and Shylock are misers; Cuddie and his mother interview Morton as Launcelot and his father interview Bassanio; Cuddie is embarrassed by his mother’s tongue, Launcelot by his father’s; Cuddie bears a note from Edith Bellenden to her lover, Launcelot one from Jessica to hers; both Cuddie and Launcelot are pleased by the outcome of the interview; both are shrewd, impudent fellows. 26 Although Gordon concludes that ‘all this does not lessen the freshness and independence of Scott’s scene’ some readers may feel he is pushing matters too hard. Such plot and character matches can be endlessly multiplied by those with sufficient knowledge and ingenuity, as they are pre-eminently but with dubious benefit in Wilmon C. Brewer’s disappointing study of Shakespeare’s influence on Scott. 27 In her treatment of Guy Mannering Jane Millgate provides a model of measured analysis in this area. After noting that ‘even casual [Shakespearean] references repay attention, since Scott’s memory was of that reverberative kind which cannot call up an isolated fragment without simultaneously evoking the echoing presence of the entire work’ she writes: There is a certain rough parallelism between the final phase of Mannering’s marriage and the plot of Othello, Lieutenant Archer even supplying a feeble version of the Iago figure. But the confusion of mother with daughter, the foolish inadequacy of Sophia when compared with Desdemona, the fact that haughtiness and withdrawal do the work originally assigned to pride and racial isolation – these push Mannering’s family disaster in the direction of tragic farce rather than of high tragedy. 28 Scott’s alterations to Shakespeare’s text cover a wide range of effects. Careless quotation can impair the original. In The Tale of Old Mortality the motto to Chapter 6 reads ‘Yea, this man’s brow, like to a tragic leaf, | Foretels the nature of a tragic volume’ (4b: 41.5–6). Shakespeare in 2 Henry IV has ‘title-leaf’. The repetition of ‘tragic’ can in no way be deemed successful: it can hardly be justified by the link with the text in Balfour’s ‘wild cast of tragic enthusiasm. His brow …’ (42.21–22). Scott does, though, improve on the master on one occasion. The line from Macbeth ‘Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff’ has been much debated by editors. In the motto to Chapter 7 of The Monastery Scott adopts Steevens’ suggestion of

134 Intertexts ‘foul’ for ‘stuff’d’ (9: 73.12), but earlier in the novel at 11.23 he takes advantage of the need to modify the quotation for the context to read ‘Or cleanse our bosoms of that perilous stuff’. In Kenilworth Scott makes Elizabeth apologise for mis-remembering a speech of Troilus. Shakespeare has Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven. Instance, O instance! strong as heaven itself: The bonds of heaven are slipp’d, dissolv’d, and loos’d; And with another knot, five-finger-tied, The fractions of her faith, orts of her love, The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics Of her o’er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed. Elizabeth abbreviates this to four lines, adjusting the opening to address the lines to Tressilian, and Scott takes advantage of her imperfect recollection to omit some seamy imagery (11: 163.31–34). When in The Pirate Magnus says that Norna’s child ‘had come before its time into this bustling world’ his memory, or Scott’s, intriguingly substitutes the word ‘bustling’ for ‘breathing’ in the opening speech of Richard III, taking it from Gloucester’s ‘leave the world for me to bustle in’ later in the scene (12: 252.17). A combination of deliberate and inadvertent change is likely in Redgauntlet when Darsie Latimer changes ‘But wonder on, till truth make all things plain’ to ‘E’en marvel on till time makes all things plain’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the substitution of ‘time’ for ‘truth’ may well be intentional (17: 77.6). When Scott uses a passage on more than one occasion, it is sometimes possible to discern a difference in the level of significance or the effectiveness of the usages. In The Fortunes of Nigel Lowestoffe’s exclamation of delight at Richie’s felling of Dalgarno is a straightforward adaptation of George Bevis’s utterance in 2 Henry VI: ‘there lies Sin, struck down like an ox, and Iniquity’s throat cut like a calf’ (13: 394.13–14). The Authorial application of the phrase to Sigismond in Anne of Geierstein follows Shakespeare less closely, but it is on a different imaginative level from the occurrence in the earlier novel: So saying, he shook in the air his enormous partisan, which quivered in his grasp like a slip of willow. Indeed, if Iniquity was to be struck down like an ox, there was not one in that chosen band more likely to perform the feat than Sigismond; for though less tall than his brethren, and of a less animated spirit, yet his breadth of shoulders and strength of muscles were enormous, and if thoroughly animated and disposed for the contest, which was very rarely the case, perhaps Rudolph himself might, as far as sheer force went, have had difficulty in matching him. (22: 163.18–26)

Intertexts  135 However, the quotation in the latter novel of ‘Thus said the Duke – thus did the Duke infer’ from Richard III as a motto introducing Philipson’s negotiations with Charles of Burgundy (275.2–3) is one-dimensional when compared with Frank’s amusing transfer of the words to refer to Sully in his opening discussion of autobiographical narrative in Rob Roy (5: 7.4). If Hector’s witty turning in The Antiquary of ‘good manners be my speed’ from 1 Henry IV (3: 151.43–152.1) is more resonant than Mowbray’s repetition of this varied version of Hotspur’s ironical ‘Good manners be your speed’ in Saint Ronan’s Well (16: 79.6) it is because of the repeated linking in the earlier novel of Hector with Hotspur (there is a jingle on their names), one of them in his previous speech (3: 151.35–36). Scott’s allusions to Shakespeare centre on a limited number of plays: from the histories the second tetralogy and in particular the two parts of Henry IV; from the comedies The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Much Ado about Nothing; and the four principal tragedies, along with Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice.29A selective survey of the allusions to 1Henry IV and 2 Henry IV will illustrate how Shakespeare functions at his most pervasive and enriching. The two Henry IV plays attract some 250 allusions, approaching onefifth of the total tally for Shakespeare in the novels. They are laid under contribution for tavern scenes, most obviously for the Bonny Black Bear in Kenilworth with its lively male bonding, 30 but also in more isolated shorthand references, as with ‘the master of the Golden Fleece’ in Anne of Geierstein, whose ‘indignation extended, like a fiery exhalation, from his nose, all over the adjacent regions of his cheeks and brow’, recalling not only the tavern location but Bardolph’s nose (22: 214.5–7). A nice touch in Kenilworth is the conversion of ‘hemp-seed’ (‘gallows-bird’) into a proper name (11: 12.40). 1 Henry IV is the locus classicus for highway and midnight robbery: the allusions link together the Reiver of Westburnflat in The Black Dwarf (4a: 42.9–12), Frank Osbaldistone as accused by Justice Inglewood in Rob Roy (5: 69.26–27), Craigengelt in The Bride of Lammermoor (7a: 131.5–11), the late Prance of Padworth lamented by Lambourne in Kenilworth (11: 12.35–36), and Wildrake contemplating the possibility of hard times in Woodstock (19: 76.41–43). As we have seen, I Henry IV also provides underpinning for instances of Worcester’s ‘deep and dangerous’ rebellion against authority in the novels. His words are adopted by Waverley as he moves into treasonable territory (1: 141.38); in The Abbot Melville warns Mary Queen of Scots that ‘Ruthven has his own deep and dangerous plans’ (10: 207.7); and Amaury’s suggestion in The Talisman that Richard should be murdered is preceded by a motto with the same expression (18b: 94.36–39).31 The Jacobite conspirators in The Black Dwarf are introduced by a motto featuring ‘the garment of rebellion’ (4a: 85.26–31),

136 Intertexts and Montrose’s assembling of royalist supporters in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose is prefixed by a more ambiguous use of Hotspur’s ‘good plot’ (7b: 60.2–4). A wide range of figures in the novels are linked with two characters from the Henry IV plays, Falstaff and Hotspur. Diverse Falstaffian qualities are emphasised in Sir Everard Waverley’s Falstaffian logic (1: 23.32–35), in Oldbuck’s affection for Lovel in The Antiquary (3: 119.5–9), in Menteith asking Dalgetty in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose of his time with the Dutch States General ‘And how did their service jump with your humour?’ (7b: 21.1), in Giles Gosling’s ‘somewhat a round belly’ in Kenilworth (11: 1.25), in an implied opposition of Sir Geoffrey as Falstaff and Bridgenorth as the Justice attempting to execute the arrest warrant in Peveril of the Peak (14: 72.2–4), and in Ramorny’s relationship with the young Duke of Rothsay in The Fair Maid of Perth (21: 182.9–10). Two of Falstaff’s expressions link another otherwise diverse group of characters: his ‘Play out the play’ to his companions as the sheriff arrives in The Abbot is echoed by Howleglas (alias Adam Woodcock) as Abbot of Unreason in the presence of the real Abbot (10: 110.25–26), and there is a witty shift when Edie Ochiltree uses the words to address the peace-officer come to arrest him in The Antiquary (3: 234.34). Falstaff’s bombastic ‘King Cambyses’ vein’ is used Authorially of Wayland Smith in blustering mode in Kenilworth (11: 240.19), by Dalgarno mocking Nigel in The Fortunes of Nigel (13: 178.33), and by Charles calming Wildrake down in Woodstock (19: 313.14–15). Both expressions are applied to Pleydell in Guy Mannering, who is repeatedly presented as consciously playing a Falstaffian role in the High Jinks and alluding to it afterwards.32 Hotspur too has a number of close relations in the novels, though none of them involve a Pleydellian density. When Fergus indicates that he ‘will not slip my dog before the game’s a-foot’ in Waverley (1: 140.10–11) it is an indication that he is more prudent than Hotspur, but as the march southwards begins he is ‘confident against the world in arms’ (280.34–35). Similarly Redgauntlet and Hotspur are linked by implication when Nixon says to Darsie ‘no doubt you are blessing your uncle for stirring you up to such an honourable action’, casting Darsie in the role of the timid Archbishop of York for the reader, though Nixon is not likely to have been aware of the Shakespeare passage (17: 313.16–17): Redgauntlet himself has shortly before indicated that ‘we have not, as Hotspur says, leisure to be sick’ (292.36–37). Hotspur lends ‘all the currents of a heady fight’ in his uneasy dream as an echo to the wounded Ivanhoe (8: 234.17) and his perspiration ‘like bubbles in a late disturbed stream’ to Balfour in The Tale of Old Mortality (4b: 45.17–18).33 While, as we have seen, in The Antiquary Hector MacIntyre recognises his kinship with the short-tempered Hotspur (3: 151.35–36, 151.43–152.1), it is the Author who likens Cedric’s contempt for Athelstane to Hotspur’s for his lukewarm correspondent in Ivanhoe (8: 158.16–19) and who

Intertexts  137 characterises Greenleaf’s ‘disposition to tire of the [minstrel’s] recitation’ as ‘Hotspur-like’ in Castle Dangerous (23b: 156.28–29), just as Sir Everard had at the beginning of the series ‘sometimes cursed in his heart the jargon of heraldry … with all the bitterness of Hotspur himself’ (1: 17.21–23).

3 Collections of proverbs were popular in Scott’s time. He himself owned the second and third editions of John Ray’s Compleat Collection of English Proverbs (1678 and 1737), as well as compilations of Scottish proverbs by James Kelly (1721) and Allan Ramsay (1737) and of Gaelic proverbs by Donald Mackintosh (1785). David Craig notes that there was ‘a craze for repeating proverbs at the tea-tables of the Edinburgh gentlefolk in the 1820’s – some people could quote dozens’. 34 Scott’s familiarity with the printed collections, and of course his fine ear for the speech habits of those he met, provide the novels with a sort of irreducible bedrock, with some 1900 usages, overlapping with biblical and Shakespearean adages and with the Author’s own gnomic observations. Graham Tulloch observes: ‘Few things can give such a sense of overhearing real conversation as the careful introduction of proverbs, while they also allow the painless introduction of dialect words’. 35 They are useful too for reinforcing regional settings or characters, for example with the series of Lincolnshire proverbs in The Heart of Mid-Lothian derived from Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, or on a more limited scale in Kenilworth with an Oxfordshire ­proverb (11:  88.36–37) and three Cornish sayings associated with Tressilian (23–24, 34.4–6). Thirty proverbs occur five times or more. By far the favourite is ‘A wilful man will have his way’, and there are also three uses of the parallel Scottish saying ‘He that maun to Cupar maun to Cupar’. In descending order of frequency thereafter one finds ‘Walls have ears’, ‘His bark is worse than his bite’, ‘Dinna fash your beard/thumb’, ‘Hand and glove’, ‘Time and tide wait for no man’, ‘Bold as a lion’, ‘Black/dark as a wolf’s mouth’, ‘The end of an old song’, ‘Hawks will not pick out hawks’ eyes’, ‘Heaven/God is above all’, ‘Keep a calm sough’, ‘True/brave as steel’, ‘It’s a wise child that knows its own father’, ‘The die is cast’, ‘Walk on eggs’, ‘Fair and soft’, ‘Forgive and forget’, ‘Give the devil his due’, ‘It’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest’, ‘Meat and mass/mess never hindered work’, ‘Moonshine in water’, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’, ‘Nothing for nothing’, ‘He that pays the piper calls the tune’, ‘Pride goes before a fall’, ‘Revenge is sweet’, ‘A sight for sore eyes’, ‘Virtue is its own reward’, and ‘Many go out for wool and come home shorn’. Together the favourite proverbs mentioned account for over a tenth of the total. No doubt some readers will find, with Hamlet, that a

138 Intertexts particular usage is ‘somewhat musty’: the Prince of Denmark’s remark is echoed by Darsie in Redgantlet and Albert in Woodstock as they write or utter half-finished proverbs (17: 303.16–17; 19: 237.25–27). But none of the sayings is so very frequently employed as to be in danger of being over-used. Being proverbs, the actual wording is very flexible. The adage listed in The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs as ‘As merry (gay, happy) as a lark’ appears in Scott as ‘as light as a lark’, ‘your heart is as light as a lavrock’s’, and ‘as blithe as a lark’.36 Although in most cases the sense is essentially the same, with each occurrence there is room for variation there also. Two of the uses of ‘His bark is worse than his bite’ apply to firearms: in Peveril of the Peak Chiffinch assures Saville that Peveril’s neutralised ‘pistols might bark, but they could not bite’ (14: 282.43), and in Redgauntlet John Davies, superintendent of the Solway fishing station, says to Joshua Geddes ‘here be a pair of buffers [pistols] will bite as well as bark’ before the Quaker throws them into a tub of water (17: 150.6). ‘The end of an old song’ is put to unusually varied uses, some of them recalling its celebrated employment by the Earl of Seafield on signing the Act of Union with England in 1707. In Waverley Bradwardine links it elegiacally with ‘Fuimus Troes’, whereas a few pages later Duncan Macwheeble joyfully embodies it in a celebration of the Baron’s coming again into his estate (1: 323.35–36, 359.3). Ailie Wilson in The Tale of Old Mortality informs the returned Morton that his uncle expired with the words ‘the name of Morton of Milnewood’s ga’en out like the last sough of an auld sang’ (4b: 316.15–16). Caleb in The Bride of Lammermoor takes his cue from Ravenswood’s invoking ‘the old song’ (‘I Have a green Purse and a wee pickle Gowd’) to give expression to his poverty, with the assurance ‘but we shall do better one day’, to say ‘Before that day comes … I doubt there will be an end of an auld sang, and an auld serving-man to boot’ (7a: 68.8–13). In A Legend of the Wars of Montrose Annot Lyle sings part of ‘one of the fashionable songs of the period’, beginning ‘Gaze not upon the stars, fond sage’, leading Menteith to remark to Macaulay ‘She is right … and this end of an old song is worth all we shall gain by our attempt to look into futurity’ (7b: 52.34–53.6). Not infrequently proverbs undergo radical mutation from the versions recorded in print. It is difficult to tell whether Scott’s forms are of his own devising or unique records of established usages. When Pate Maxwell in Redgauntlet says ‘I’ll ask no more questions – the answers all smell of new lords new lands’ (17: 216.2–3) he is varying ‘New lords, new laws’ (ODEP, 564: the standard version is used by Meg Dods in the preceding novel, Saint Ronan’s Well (16: 128.2)). Duke Hildebrod’s expression ‘as deaf as Paul’s’ applied to Trapbois in The Fortunes of Nigel is a variant of the common ‘As old as Paul’s’ (13: 258.4; ODEP, 588), though ‘As high as Paul’s’ is also recorded (11: 239.28, 514). When in The Surgeon’s Daughter Hartley declines to accept a ring from the Fakir

Intertexts  139 Barak with the words ‘the wise of every country are brethren. My left hand takes no guerdon of my right’ (20: 247.24–26), Scott is giving him a version varied in form and sense of ‘To refuse with the right hand and take with the left’ (ODEP, 669). In one strange instance, in The Monastery, the Author asserts that ‘Pride … has been said to save man, and woman too, from falling’ (9: 194.13–14), reversing the common ‘Pride will have a fall’ (ODEP, 647) which appears essentially in its standard form on four other occasions in the novels. From time to time a character can be observed using an aphorism in an unusually creative or witty manner. When, in Saint Ronan’s Well, Etherington writes ‘Time was – time is – and, if I catch it not by the forelock as it passes, time will be no more’ (16: 245.26–28), he is inserting the proverbial ‘Take time by the forelock’ (ODEP, 822) into the celebrated sentence with the triple occurrence of ‘time’ in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. The marauding miller in Ivanhoe rashly provokes Gurth by threatening him with an allusion to the adage ‘An honest miller has a golden thumb’ (ODEP, 532): ‘Come on, churl, an thou darest: thou shalt feel the strength of a miller’s thumb!’. Gurth responds, first by returning the proverb to its normal sense (‘If thou beest a miller … thou art doubly a thief’), and then by fighting him and knocking him down (8: 106.3–36). The vast majority of the proverbial references are content to be expressions of popular wisdom, often pithy and vigorous, to which characters can resort as they do to adages that have in effect become proverbial, drawn most frequently from the Bible and Shakespeare. Some characters – often with little else in common – are much given to thinking, or at least expressing themselves, in aphorisms: Fergus Mac-Ivor and Evan Dhu Maccombich (with their Gaelic proverbs) in Waverley, and Baillie Macwheeble towards the end of that novel; Oldbuck and Edie Ochiltree in The Antiquary; Cuddie Headrigg and Jenny Dennison in The Tale of Old Mortality; Andrew Fairservice and Bailie Jarvie in Rob Roy;37 Bartoline Saddletree and Duncan Knockdunder in The Heart of Mid-Lothian; in The Bride of Lammermoor the hunter Norman, Lord Turntippppet, Caleb Balderstone, Bucklaw and Craigengelt, Mrs Lightbody, and the hags; Wamba in Ivanhoe; Adam Woodcock and Ralph Fisher in The Abbot; Giles Lambourne in Kenilworth; Claud Halcro and Bryce Snailsfoot in The Pirate; Lance Outram in Peveril of the Peak; Etherington and Micklewhame in Saint Ronan’s Well; Nanty Ewart in Redgauntlet; Wildrake and Joliffe in Woodstock. A character one might expect to be given to proverbial utterance is Waverley’s Davie Gellatley. In fact he produces only one specimen (most of his gnomic energy finding an outlet in fragments of song), but it is a masterpiece: ‘Like sour ale in summer’ is an inimitable uninvited rejoinder to Macwheeble’s assertion that the Laird of Balmawhapple will ‘mend’ (1: 69.39–41). This is actually the first proverb in the series, heralding the riches to come.

140 Intertexts Although by their nature proverbs tend to be individually unremarkable Scott can on occasion deploy them with considerable power. In The Tale of Old Mortality they are used with chilling effect by two authority figures on the royalist side. Claverhouse resorts to a proverb when commanding Meiklewrath’s execution (‘see that he does not bite you, to put an old proverb to shame’ (4b: 269.28–29)), and shortly afterwards he has two terse expressions of worldly wisdom (272.40–41, 273.37). In the torture scene that follows, Lauderdale has three grim proverbs to match the proceedings (278.39–42, 280.21–22). Effie’s proverbial utterances in The Heart of Mid-Lothian are totally different in mode, but equal in effect. They are not numerous, but the first words we hear from her are a proverb (‘Better tyne life, since tint is gude fame’ (6: 59.22)), and a later example, varying ‘save your breath to cool your porridge’, is particularly memorable, expressing her despairing resignation in prison: ‘we’ll speak nae mair about this matter, and ye may save your breath to say your carritch [catechism]; and for me, I’ll soon hae nae breath to waste on ony body’ (189.28–30). In the same novel Scott reinforces the presentation of the Duke of Argyle as a man of the people by giving him three aphorisms in his first meeting with Jeanie, the last being particularly telling: ‘ilka man buckles his belt his ain gate – you know our old Scots proverb?’ (324.15–16).38

4 Scott draws on a wide range of authors other than Shakespeare to support his narrative strategies. 39 The urbanely detached tone is particularly reinforced by many of the eighty-odd allusions to Horace, and of the references to the English Augustans, notably twenty each to Addison and Sheridan, and a dozen to Gay. Linguistic vitality is the outstanding contribution of the Elizabeth and Jacobean dramatists (including Ben Jonson), of the ballads, and of Burns. With the last of these it is the marvellous energy of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ that predominates, rather than expressions of sentiment such as ‘Firm Resolve … Thou stalk o’ carle-hemp in man’ found in The Fortunes of Nigel (13: 296.11–13). ‘Tam’ is enlisted for the revelry and good cheer at Woodbourne in Guy Mannering, albeit in a rather different social milieu (2: 296.24–26), for Butler’s induction feast in the last volume of The Heart of Mid-Lothian when ‘as the mirth and fun grew fast and furious, the graver members of the party began to escape as well as they could’ (6: 405.39), for the lively companionship of Black Knight and Friar in Ivanhoe (8: 152.8–9), and in The Surgeon’s Daughter for Hartley’s superiority to Middlemas ‘in hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels’ (20: 188.8–9). The next line in Burns’s poem, ‘Put life and mettle in their heels’, retains its original dancing sense when the expression is applied by Charles to Fenella in Peveril of the Peak (14: 327.23–24), but it is also used for Jeanie Deans’s

Intertexts  141 general fitness in The Heart of Mid-Lothian (6: 163.2–3) and for Proudfute’s taking to his heels in The Fair Maid of Perth (21: 124.26–28). For proverbial and gnomic enhancement Scott owes a special debt to Aesop, Cicero, and Juvenal among the ancients, and Fielding among the moderns, though there are hardly more than a dozen references to the Englishman’s works, among a mere forty or so to Scott’s British fictional predecessors. Outstanding for character types are Chaucer (with nearly fifty references almost a lone figure from the medieval period), Dryden, and Farquhar, with Crabbe as the chronicler of typical situations and relationships, and Joanna Baillie for psychological acuteness. Spenser’s Faerie Queene is used to point up the gap between ideals and actual realities, as well as to introduce a range of sinister characters. Ben Jonson is invaluable for alchemy, and together with Butler’s Hudibras for anti-Puritan satire. Milton’s Paradise Lost contributes notable diabolical imagery: at a couple of points it links up with impressive descriptions of culinary procedures centred on Comus. With its foregrounding of dramatic devices Buckingham’s farce The Rehearsal is cited by self-­ consciously theatrical characters. And the rich collection Tales of the East, by Scott’s assistant Henry Weber, is a reliable source for the fabulous and the wonderful. Seven authors will particularly repay individual scrutiny for the distinctiveness, depth, and coherence of their contribution to the series: Virgil, Ariosto, and Cervantes as Classical and European writers; Prior as a comparatively minor writer with a remarkably varied contribution list; and three authors with whom it is clear Scott felt a very special relationship – Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. From their schooldays Scott and many of his male readers at least were familiar with the Classical authors writing in Latin, and their experience is explicitly matched by that of several of the characters in the novels. ‘In classical literature, Waverley had made the usual progress, and read the usual authors’ (1: 15.17–18). Michael Lambourne in Kenilworth recalls the significantly named Doctor Bricham advising his pupils that ‘your antecedent will have a consequent – raro antecedentem’ (11: 281.12–13). In The Tale of Old Mortality Peter Pattieson ruefully observes that for the schoolmaster ‘even the flowers of classic genius, with which his solitary fancy is most gratified, have been rendered degraded, in his imagination, by their connection with tears, with errors, and with punishment; so that the Eclogues of Virgil and Odes of Horace are each inseparably allied in association with the sullen figure and monotonous recitation of some blubbering school-boy’ (4b: 5.27–6.1).40 And in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose Dalgetty wittily turns lines by Horace imbibed at Mareschal College to apply to his preference for firearms over bows and arrows (7b: 118.1–5). Those who had Horace instilled into them in their formative years might be expected to recognise a glancing allusion such as that in

142 Intertexts Ivanhoe: ‘Less obstinate, and even less dangerous combats, have been described in good heroic verse; but that of Gurth and the Miller must remain unsung, for want of a sacred poet to do justice to its eventful progress’ (8: 106.13–16). The highly apposite passage in the Odes reads, in English translation: ‘Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in unending night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred bard’. Again, a brief unsignalled reference can be enough to evoke the original, as with Triptolomeus’s flight from his captors in The Pirate: ‘They who had seen him that day … and who had an o ­ pportunity of comparing his round spherical form and short legs with the ­portentous speed at which he scoured through the streets, might well say, that if Fury ministers arms, Fear confers wings’ (12: 329.7–13 – Virgil has ­‘furor arma ministrat’ in the Aeneid). A moving passage in the first chapter of Chronicles of the Canongate suggests that recollections of the Classics can have unusual staying power. The doctor in attendance on a dying lawyer suffering from dementia quotes Juvenal to characterise his state, prompting the patient to recall a case involving a death-bed bequest. The invalid’s attention is similarly roused shortly afterwards by a gold box brought as a present by Chrystal Croftangry: his eye ‘was caught by it, as that of a child by a glittering toy’ (20: 20.2–21.8). The implied parallel is a telling one. Scott’s narratives often have a pervasive Classical dimension. This can be routine, as with the ‘sibyls’, ‘Ganymedes’, and the like, or images such as that applied to the mustering of the forces before Prestonpans in Waverley: ‘The two armies … now faced each other like two gladiators in the arena, each meditating upon the mode of attacking their enemy’ (1: 235.22–26). E. M. Forster censures the similar, but more developed, image of the sacrifice of Christians to wild animals in the Roman amphitheatre, applied to Sir Arthur and Isabella threatened by the rising waters in The Antiquary (3: 58.21–29). But the image there is richly resonant, with ‘sacrifice, an advancing ferocious animal, the circular shape of the bay, and the pious ejaculations’.41 Many of Scott’s Classical allusions are on this significant level. As Bruce Stovel says, at the end of his fine article ‘Waverley and the Aeneid: Scott’s Art of Allusion’: Unlike Jane Austen, he makes no pretence of being unlearned and uninformed: we read his novels in Scott’s own scholarly editions, bracketed by prefaces, appendices, and scores of footnotes; his narrative seems cluttered with scholarly allusions and antiquarian explanations; many of his own favourite characters are pedants like the Baron, bristling with fragments of obscure knowledge. I hope I have suggested, however, by examining one set of literary allusions, that Scott does not scatter his learning through his pages for its own sake; instead, like Fielding or George Eliot or Joyce, he uses allusion

Intertexts  143 as an artistic device, one capable of adding subtlety, range, and coherence to the work of art.42 Virgil is the most prominent Classical author to be cited in the novels, closely followed by Horace and at a greater distance by Homer, with forty, largely mock-heroic in tone except for some of Pope’s translations which contribute a degree of gravitas. Two-thirds of the Virgilian references are to the Aeneid, the rest divided between the Eclogues and the Georgics (the last particularly popular with Triptolemus as would-be agricultural improver in The Pirate). There are generic names: in The Bride of Lammermoor Craigengelt is Bucklaw’s Achates (7a: 90.13–15, 137.33–34), and in Rob Roy deceitful dealers are ‘these modern Sinons’ (5: 31.31–32). Familiar tags attract repeated allusions. ‘Varium et mutabile semper femina’ is employed by a diverse range of characters: Dominie Sampson in Guy Mannering, crest-fallen at Lucy’s request for Hazelwood’s visits to cease (2: 86.18–20); Louis XI in Quentin Durward, on the likelihood of Isabelle’s agreeing to marry Orleans (15: 338.7); Dr Grumball in Redgauntlet, of Charles’s mistress (17: 350.25); and Raleigh in Kenilworth, of Elizabeth, speaking to Blount who does not understand the Latin (11: 326.26). Two allusions to Dido’s promise ‘Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur’ (I will treat Trojan and Tyrian impartially) are similarly varied. In Guy Mannering Pleydell uses it in offering to accompany Mannering ‘to the presbyterian kirk, or the episcopal meeting-house … Tros Tyriusve, a lawyer, you know is of both religions, or rather I should say of both forms’ (2: 211.18–23). Nothing could be more different than the description of Knockdunder’s ludicrous combination of Highland and Lowland garb in The Heart of Mid-­Lothian, adopted ‘in order to show his impartiality to Trojan or Tyrian’ (6: 394.10–23). Both Author and characters display considerable wit in several of the Virgilian allusions. When the Osbaldistone sons first appear in Rob Roy the Author observes: ‘The strong Gyas, and the strong Cloanthus, are not less distinguished by the poet, than the strong Percival, the strong Thorncliffe, the strong John, Richard, Wilfred Osbaldistones, were by outward appearance’ (5: 44.7–10). Scott has great delight in playing with the literal and societal lions and boars/bores pursued by the young Ascanius and the denizens of Saint Ronan’s Well respectively (16: 35.5–10, 41–43). Also in Saint Ronan’s Well, Micklewham recalls that his ‘auld master had a wee bit Latin about rerum dominos gentemque togatam, whilk signified, he said, that all lairds should be lawyers’ (93.22–24: the original sense of the expression in the Aeneid is ‘lords of the world, and the nation of the gown’). In The Fortunes of Nigel it is reported that when King James recalls the wound inadvertently inflicted on his own buttock by Lord Huntinglen during the Ruthven Raid he is wont to cite the poignant words ‘infandum … renovare dolorem’ from

144 Intertexts the opening of the second book of the Aeneid, where Aeneas begins his account of the fall of Troy at Dido’s request with the line ‘Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem’ (Unutterable, O Queen, is the sorrow you are ordering me to relive’ (13: 156.3–7)). Later in the novel he notes that a change of gender to make a line apply to himself would disrupt the metre (357.3–8), and when requesting Huntinglen not to shout he says ‘non surdo canes’ (358.1), adapting a line in the tenth Eclogue ‘non canimus surdis, respondent omnia silvae’ (We do not sing to deaf ears; the woods echo every note). There is wit, also, in two of the rare translations provided by Bradwardine in Waverley. A couplet giving a version, rather than a translation, and ascribed by the Baron to Struan Robertson, is almost certainly Scott’s (1: 219.24–28 – the ‘elegantly’ in Bradwardine’s ‘Whilk verses Robertson of Struan … has thus elegantly rendered’ is exquisite). A further couplet similarly attributed to William Hamilton of Bangour is again very likely to be Scott’s, though drawing on Dryden’s translation (225.1–4). But, as Bruce Stovel demonstrates in the article just referred to, Bradwardine’s allusions to the Aeneid are not merely witty: they lend the narrative a Virgilian gravitas. When the Baron greets Waverley for the first time as ‘spes altera, as Maro hath it’ (45.27–28) his words (unbeknownst to the speaker) set in train the motif of Waverley, in effect his adopted son, as Aeneas, continuing a line beyond the age of primitive violence to which Fergus is a throwback. The Classics provide Bradwardine with an expression for his regretful resignation of that quasi-Trojan world, significantly linked with a resonant proverb, as noted above: ‘To be sure we may say with Virgilius Maro, Fuimus Troes – and there’s the end of an auld sang’ (323.34–36). For Scott, Ariosto was a life-long favourite. At the High School in Edinburgh he had incurred the wrath of his teacher by having ‘the audacity to produce a composition in which I weighed Homer against Ariosto, and pronounced him wanting in the balance’, and towards the end of his life he is reported as saying he had read the Orlando furioso, as well as Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, every year.43 The twenty or so allusions to Ariosto are mostly general rather than to specific passages. Three times he is cited in support of the narrative method employed in the novels, pursuing the fortunes of one character and then backtracking to bring others up to date in The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Ivanhoe (6: 143.20–28; 8: 152.12–15), or retreating from the description of the wedding that concludes Quentin Durward (15: 400.40–401.11). Unlike Ariosto, though, the Author of Waverley offers his readers a journey in ‘a humble English post-chaise’ rather than ‘a flying chariot drawn by hippogriffs’ (1: 26.18–23). The High School teacher’s rebuke seems to have led Scott to take Ariosto as his most notable example of the delightful, fascinating exercise of the imagination which is liable to be attacked as delusive, of no practical value, or even corrupting. On his first visit to Tully-Veolan the Author (and by implication Waverley also) compare

Intertexts  145 and contrast its grounds with the enchanted garden of the witch Alcina (40.15–26). In the final volume a passionate debate arises ‘whether the Gaelic or Italian language was most liquid and best adapted for poetry’. Flora supports the Gaelic cause, while Rose shows her good taste by praising Italian, ‘which she had studied with Waverley’s assistance’. This leads Waverley to say to himself: ‘She has a more correct ear than Flora … I suppose Miss Mac-Ivor will next compare Mac-Murrough nan Fonn [the bard who sang in Chapter 20] to Ariosto’ (271.26–37). Later in the volume, the hero’s discovery of his Ariosto hurled from Rose’s apartment at the sacked Tully-Veolan is narrated in a single sentence of understated poignancy: ‘Amongst these [books] Waverley distinguished one of his own, a small copy of Ariosto, and gathered it as a treasure, though wasted by the wind and rain’ (317.4–6). In Rob Roy Frank is not only a reader, but a translator, of Ariosto (5: 20.21–30); the clear opposition set up between the world of the imagination and that of business is revisited when Die comes across his attempt to continue the earlier translation (oddly, it consists of the opening lines) and, though Frank says she understands the original very well, suggests that his time might be better spent on attending to the danger to his father’s business consequent on his having left Rashleigh ‘in the almost uncontrolled management of his affairs’ (130–32). Something similar is at work in the short debate on Ariosto’s status in the course of the deeply felt debate between Eustace and Warden in The Monastery following the former’s quotation of ‘Oh gran bontà’. Eustace suggests that Warden’s ‘new faith forbids you to reserve a place in your memory, even for what high poets have recorded of loyal faith and generous sentiment’, to which the preacher responds that Ariosto ‘affords strains fitter for a dissolute court than for a convent’, leading the Sub-Prior to deplore ‘the judgment that, like the flesh-fly, skims over whatever is sound, to detect and settle upon some spot which is tainted’ (9: 290.17–31). There is a less serious (but not insignificant) version of the disagreement in Redgauntlet when Darsie uses an amusing parallel from Ariosto even though the more earthbound Alan may ‘affect contempt of that fascinating and delicious poem’ (17: 23.39–24.2). Two references to the Italian poet anticipate and reinforce respectively that assertion by Eustace of his moral seriousness. The dissension among the Jacobites in Waverley is signalled by the chapter title ‘The Confusion of King Agramant’s Camp’ (1: 285.9): in Orlando furioso the confusion was wrought by the Archangel Michael to disrupt the Moorish military machine. The poem is an important part of the mental furniture of the Elizabethan court in Kenilworth, translated by the Queen’s godson Harington and cited by the Monarch herself: ‘Discord, as the Italian poet says, will find her way into peaceful convents, as well as into the privacy of families’ (11: 297.10–11; 326.6–7). At the very end of the series in Count Robert of Paris Scott seals his life-long enthusiasm by introducing two parallels between Brenhilda and Ariosto’s female warriors: the

146 Intertexts first is Authorial, but the second (coming from Agelastes) stands out as an extreme anachronism (23a: 112.23–31, 180.36). The importance of Cervantes to Scott is suggested by more than fifty allusions in his letters and a further ten or so in the Journal. Towards the end of his life he is reported to have indicated ‘that the “novelas” of that author had first inspired him with the ambition of excelling in fiction, and that, until disabled by illness, he had been a constant reader of them’.44 In the novels Don Quixote (rather than the shorter Novelas ejemplares) is invoked on some sixty occasions. The first three series of Tales of my Landlord carry on the verso of most of their title-pages or half-titles45 a short epigram from Don Quixote in the original Spanish and the following translation by Charles Jarvis: It is mighty well, said the priest; pray, landlord, bring me those books, for I have a mind to see them. With all my heart, answered the host; and, going to his chamber, he brought out a little old clokebag, with a padlock and chain to it, and opening it, he took out three large volumes, and some manuscript papers written in a fine character. In his anonymous self-review of the first series for the Quarterly Review, Scott observed: ‘They are entitled Tales of my Landlord: why so entitled, excepting to introduce a quotation from Don Quixote, it is difficult to conceive: for Tales of my Landlord they are not, nor is it indeed easy to say whose tales they ought to be called’.46 Two of the three volumes taken out of the cloke-bag are romances full of tall stories; the third is a military biography. The manuscript is of a novela with a moral slant. The bag’s contents give rise to a debate encompassing the moral and aesthetic function of literature, and the relationship between fantasy and reality. By choosing the epigram Scott prompts his readers to join in the debate on these issues, and also draws attention to ‘his own attempt to resolve the dichotomy of fact and fiction through the adoption of typically Cervantine narrative strategies, namely interpolation, the multiplication of frames, and metafictional self-reflexivity’.47 Most of the allusions to Don Quixote in the texts of the novels are related to the fundamental opposition between the imaginary and the real in Cervantes, with Quixote at one extreme and Sancho with his proverbial earthiness at the other. After noting that the reader may have been led by the opening chapters of Waverley to expect ‘an imitation of the romance of Cervantes’ the Author says that his hero displays ‘aberration from sound judgment’ rather than Quixote’s ‘total perversion of intellect’ (1: 20.3–12). In Redgauntlet Darsie, although never accused of suffering from ‘total perversion of intellect’, is linked several times with Quixote, as his more prosaic friend Alan urges on him a basically sound

Intertexts  147 grasp of reality present or achievable and he responds in self-defence:48 it is ironic that the woman’s outfit Redgauntlet forces on him means he has to wear a mask ‘thickened with a plate of steel, which, like Quixote’s visor, serves to render it more strong and durable’ and also reminds him of ‘the Man in the Iron Mask’ (17: 204.31–205.4). In Saint Ronan’s Well Touchwood finds the Spa’s impression of Tyrrel deludedly Quixotic (16: 140.3–9), as does Hermione her mother’s fantasies of family dignity in The Fortunes of Nigel (13: 220.32–37) and Brenda her sister’s chivalric extravagance in The Pirate (12: 193.3–10). The Author himself is like Quixote with his white shield at the beginning of Waverley (though the text has only ‘a maiden knight’ (1: 3.21–24)), and there is a degree of fellow-feeling in his detection of a Quixotic element in Oldbuck’s bibliophilia if not bibliomania in The Antiquary (3: 23.22–35). Oldbuck quotes Sancho’s proverbial utterance ‘Ni quito Rey, ni pongo Rey’ in support of his political quietism (47.29–33), implying that he takes a down-to-earth approach to matters political. When Sancho is introduced earthiness, or bringing down to earth, is always involved: as when Oldbuck and Hector (attacking the seal) are unexpectedly cast in the roles of servant and master (246.8–11), or when Triptolemus in The Pirate is happy to devour left-overs as Sancho the scum (12: 101.37–38), or when in Waverley Bradwardine’s pedantic wit grows mouldy like the servant’s jests (1: 284.23–24). In The Fortunes of Nigel the figure of the Author himself shares in this earthing when, unable to complete a suggested fictional task, his ‘quirks and quiddits … would lie rotting in my gizzard, like Sancho’s suppressed witticisms when he was under his master’s displeasure’ (13: 7.4–7). A Sanchoesque presence is also felt in two further proverbial sayings drawn from Cervantes. The most frequently cited of these is the expression ‘fasting from all but sin’. Motteux’s translation assigns this to a housekeeper: ‘Troth, master, take my advice; I am neither drunk nor mad, but fresh and fasting from every thing but sin’. In Saint Ronan’s Well Meg Dods uses it in a vigorous protestation of her sobriety to MacTurk (16: 107.41–43), and in Redgauntlet Peter Peebles follows suit, being ‘black-fasting from all but sin’ (17: 178.35); but Hildebrod’s similar assertion in The Fortunes of Nigel is succeeded by the ingestion of copious draughts of liquor (13: 257.11–18). Eustace makes use of the expression in The Monastery to argue that his encounter with the White Lady can only have a supernatural explanation (9: 94.11–15), and in Guy Mannering Dominie Sampson finds himself in a parallel situation in the presence of Meg Merrilees, adopting the proverb wittily to answer her proverbial question ‘are you fow or fasting?’ (2: 279.13–14). The other proverbial expression ‘Patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards’ is found frequently in the letters and Journal as a quasi-proverbial source of encouragement, and it is so employed by Fergus Mac-Ivor and Louis XI in Waverley and Quentin Durward, in the latter case with an explanatory footnote (1: 209.30–31; 15: 102.36–43).

148 Intertexts The pervasiveness of Scott’s debt to Cervantes is most happily suggested by a vignette of an urchin in Saint Ronan’s Well, strictly unnecessary to the narrative, but delightfully sketched: The little outcast had an indifferent pair of pantaloons, and about half a jacket, for, like Pentapolin with the naked arm, he went on action with his right shoulder bare; a third part of what had once been a hat covered his hair, bleached white by the sun, and his face, as brown as a berry, was illumined by a pair of eyes, which for spying out either peril or profit, might have rivalled those of the hawk. (16: 287.2–8) Ultimately, though, the debt is a profoundly serious one: in the Introductory Address intended for the Fourth Series of Tales of my Landlord Scott writes at length about his affinity with the Spanish master in his rich, careless prime and in his final illness (23b: 194–208). There are fewer than twenty allusions to Matthew Prior, but they are among the most varied in the novels. Prior’s predominant tone is urbanely witty, and three of Scott’s usages take that tone directly on board: in the account of Waverley’s education for the influence of Alma, Prior’s domineering impulsive mind or spirit, on many developing youths, though not Waverley himself (1: 12.36–13.1); from ‘A Better Answer’ for a light-hearted discussion of the fictive nature of art in the Prefatory Letter to Peveril of the Peak (14: 9.43–10.3); and for the motto from ‘Down-Hall’ introducing the breakfast at Tillietudlem in The Tale of Old Mortality (4b: 99.34–36), though that scene soon darkens. Prior’s ‘The Ladle’ is also enlisted to contribute to the jocular treatment of the chariot race to Ravenswood Castle in The Bride of Lammermoor, a matter serious enough in itself (7a: 176.42–45). ‘The Thief and the Cordelier’ provides a sort of gallows humour for the motto to the second chapter of The Heart of Mid-Lothian introducing Wilson and Robertson (6: 21.2–10): the omission of the ‘Derry down’ refrain diminishes the comic effect of the original. The same poem is invoked in Count Robert of Paris for a bonding between Protestant Author and reader at the expense of Orthodox confession accompanied by the promise of favours to the Church (23a: 263.12–20). There are three allusions to Prior’s atypically serious Henry and Emma, a retelling of the love test story found in ‘The Not-browne Mayd’ in Percy’s Reliques. In The Pirate Scott uses it for the motto of Chapter 39 and the Percy poem for the motto to the next chapter, thus linking the two chapters so that the knowing reader will be aware of the difference between the fictive nature of Henry’s misdeeds and the genuine nefariousness of Cleveland’s past (12: 360.31–35, 369.16–20). Prior’s poem is employed in a more straightforward delineation of Edith’s feeling for Henry Morton in The Tale of Old Mortality, the Emma/Henry Edith/Henry match introducing a slight

Intertexts  149 element of playfulness (4b: 81.32–36), and in the Introductory Address to the fourth series of Tales of my Landlord the same lines are applied in a jocular sense not present in the original to the Author’s constancy to the Waverley enterprise (23b: 195.1–6). Another untypically serious poem, Solomon, is used by Frank Osbaldistone to suggest his obsession with Die Vernon in Rob Roy (5: 334.24–29). In Saint Ronan’s Well Scott matches Prior’s wit in transferring the line in an occasional poem, ‘But how can I answer, since first I must read thee?’, from personal attacks deliberately left unread to messages negligently undelivered (16: 39.26), but he entirely drains Prior’s Cupid as bird of prey (in ‘The Dove’) of its lightness and salacious eroticism in applying it to Amy shrinking at the Queen’s approach in Kenilworth (11: 315.36–39). The novels have nearly forty references to Samuel Johnson’s works. Most of these draw on his weighty gnomic utterances, either in speech or in written form, the predominant mode being stoical. Seged in The Rambler is cited three times for his warning against relying on the prospect of happiness: once in mild exasperation by Oldbuck in The Antiquary (3: 52.13–21); once in similar tone by the Author with reference to unwelcome intrusions on the King’s presence in Peveril of the Peak (14: 455.2–7); and again by the Author more seriously for the uneasy end of the festival of Saint John in The Pirate (12: 230.22–26). Minna’s role in that uneasiness has been anticipated on her first appearance by a clear echo of the most celebrated of Johnson’s sombre comments on human existence in Rasselas: ‘She endured mirth, rather than enjoyed it’ (22.13–14). Central to the stoical Johnsonian allusions is The Vanity of Human Wishes, attracting ten references. Johnson’s ‘Pow’r too great to keep or to resign’ is used to sum up Leicester’s dilemma in Kenilworth (11: 211.11–13), and for the situation faced by Parliament when confronted by Cromwell in Woodstock (19: 116.35–38). The fate of Charles of Sweden (‘His Fall was destin’d to a barren Strand’) is openly altered to apply to Richard’s death in the concluding words of Ivanhoe (8: 401.30–36).49 There is a much more fleeting echo of the Swedish passage in Waverley’s lament for Fergus’s imagined death on ‘a nameless heath’ (1: 299.41–42), prompting the alert and knowledgeable reader to recall also Johnson’s ‘Soul of Fire’ (line 193) and link it with Fergus’s ‘ardent spirit’ that immediately follows the ‘nameless heath’ and his being ‘all air and fire’ (280.34, recalling the Dauphin’s horse in Henry V). It is significant that Scott chooses to bow out at the end of the Introductory Address to the fourth series of Tales of my Landlord with a line from this poem describing what he hopes to avoid: ‘Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage’ (23b: 208.32). Two other overt references confirm that Scott felt a particular affinity with Johnson. In the Prefatory Letter to Peveril of the Peak Dryasdust describes the Author of Waverley as wearing ‘a suit of snuff-brown, cut in imitation of that worn by the great Rambler’ (14: 5.34–36). And in the first motto of Guy Mannering an

150 Intertexts extract from The Idler reminds us by its closeness to the actual narrative of Scott’s fundamentally Johnsonian (‘circumbendibus’) style: it is possible the knowledgeable reader may recall that in The Idler Will Marvel’s reaction to his Devon environment is exaggerated and this may influence their interpretation of the opening description. 50 Of the thirty allusions to poems by Wordsworth, seven draw on his obsession with spots that are numinous, or even haunted. The most prominent of these pieces is ‘Hart-Leap Well’. It broods over Saint Ronan’s Well, where the title-page bears the epigraph ‘“A jolly place,” said he, “in times of old! | But something ails it now: the spot is curst.”’ The lines are repeated in the opening chapter (16: 6.3–4), with a clear application to the decline of the inn at Saint Ronan’s. 51 But their presence on the title-page of each volume means that the reader will inevitably apply them to the catastrophe. This wider application is reinforced by the description of the ‘spot’ (the word is used three times) at the Buckstane where Tyrrel goes to meet Clara, the narratologically otiose story of the stone closely echoing Wordsworth’s poem (76.27–77.23). 52 The spot is recalled again when the lines on the Saint Ronan’s Well title-page, in an impaired version, are used to introduce the history of the cauldron monument in The Betrothed (18a: 208.12–14). The other spot latched on to for the novels is the site of the grave in ‘The Thorn’, alluded to in passing without any specific overtones in describing Ochiltree’s posture at the site of the intended duel in The Antiquary (3: 160.13–16), but with much greater resonance for the ‘hillock of moss, such as the poet of Grasmere has described’ (the word ‘spot’ occurs twice) and which may also be the site of an infant burial in The Heart of Mid-Lothian (6: 272.42–273.5). Wordsworth furnishes what were rapidly becoming classic articulations of profound psychological sentiments, ranging from Oldbuck’s lament drawn from ‘The Fountain’ in The Antiquary (3: 75.12–22) to Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Mid-Lothian experiencing ‘the wild and wayward thoughts which Wordsworth has described as rising in an absent lover’s imagination’ (6: 240.24–25, referring back to the chapter motto from ‘Strange fits of passion’ on the previous page). In a quite different mode, Scott is attracted to ‘The Idiot Boy’ for the clearly signalled reference prompted by Davie Gellatley in Waverley (1: 320.34), and for the general but unmistakable parallel with young Davie, ‘the disconsolate express’, in The Antiquary (3: 114–17). The jocular mode evident in the presentation of the second Davie in particular is continued in slightly different ways in Saint Ronan’s Well with Lady Penelope’s use of the Foy pony to laugh at Clara’s slow progress (16: 80.4–7) and, combined with an open allusion to Bürger’s Lenore, with the doctor’s arduous nocturnal visitations in The Surgeon’s Daughter (20: 159.16–22). Of nearly sixty references to Coleridge, twenty are to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and sixteen to ‘Christabel’. One of the former includes a general tribute to Coleridge: the breeze like a meadow gale invoked to

Intertexts  151 characterise Halbert’s reawakening consciousness of the natural world after his encounter with the White Lady in The Monastery is ‘the beautiful and wild idea of the most imaginative of our modern bards’ (9: 119.16–21). Scott uses three passages from the poem on several occasions. In Kenilworth the linking of owl and ivy-tod is most strikingly deployed with other overtones of the ‘Rime’ in the tensely expectant scene as Queen Elizabeth approaches the castle (11: 285.14–39), and less atmospherically when Raleigh laughs at the ‘forlorn and ghastly aspects of his companions of the watch’ (137.37–40). Edie Ochiltree has a Scots version in The Antiquary (3: 167.6–9), and the Author a slight echo recalling also Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard as part of the Alpine description in the opening chapters of Anne of Geierstein (22: 21.33–36). The haunting picture of the Mariner gliding like night from land to land is applied to Oliver Dain going about the King’s business in Quentin Durward, characteristically fused with a reference to Luke: ‘He glided like night, from tent to tent, from house to house, making himself friends, but not in the Apostle’s sense, with the Mammon of unrighteousness’ (15: 340.21–24). Coleridge’s lines form the motto introducing Norna’s telling of her story to the Troil sisters in Chapter 19 of The Pirate (12: 174.16–21), and in Saint Ronan’s Well Penny uses them as one of a set of conscious literary allusions, including Coleridge’s ‘Dark Ladié’, to characterise Clara with an effect less than wholly jocular (16: 53.39–40). The Mariner as ‘a sadder and a wiser’ man is echoed with the hero of Waverley and with Bucklaw in The Bride of Lammermoor towards the end of the respective novels (1: 315.25–28; 7a: 262.8–10). Both of these are entirely serious echoes, unlike the servant Patrick’s listening ‘like one of sense forlorn’ to Touchwood’s demands for comfortable accommodation in Saint Ronan’s Well (16: 351.6–8). One isolated reference to the poem confirms that it touched Scott’s imagination at a deep level. Darsie’s vivid description of his rescue from the Solway by Redgauntlet runs: ‘My eyes began to swim … I chattered and howled to the howling and roaring sea … he seized me, as if I had been a child of six months old’ (17: 159.11–19). This recalls both the ice which ‘roared and howled, | Like noises in a swound’ and the Wedding-Guest forced to listen ‘like a three years’ child’. Of the references to ‘Christabel’ four allude to two passages. As a now classic description of abduction, the seizing of the ‘maid forlorn’ is invoked for the carryings-off of Isabella Vere in The Black Dwarf (4a: 74.4–10) and Eveline Berenger in The Betrothed (18a: 201.21–25). 53 In Coleridge’s poem Christabel and Geraldine steal into the castle ‘Now in glimmer, and now in gloom’. This line is applied to Jeanie Deans on her way to meet Robertson in The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Although the situation is very different, with Jeanie alone and out of doors, there is evidently a play on the links between her, Christabel, and Christiana from The Pilgrim’s Progress (6: 136.36–39): the connection with Christabel

152 Intertexts is reinforced at 277.6–8, where there is a closer correspondence between the action of poem and novel. The same line is also applied (without quotation marks) with considerable comic effect to Ursula’s navigating her way through the machinery at David Ramsay’s establishment in The Fortunes of Nigel (13: 97.19–25). More seriously, if less successfully, there is an attempt to enlist Geraldine’s mysterious aura in the service of the White Lady in The Monastery (9: 112.36–38). Two short Coleridgean poems had a particularly profound significance for Scott. The first line of ‘The Dungeon’ (‘And this place our forefathers made for man’), slightly varied with ‘built’, is used in Anne of Geierstein as a motto for the chapter where Arthur Philipson is fearfully imprisoned (22: 153.30–31, the ‘sunless sea’ of ‘Kubla Khan’ being echoed on the next page); and in Count Robert of Paris the Emperor observes to his daughter that ‘Alexius Comnenus does not, without alarm, descend into those awful dungeons which his predecessors built for men’ (23a: 274.4–6). ‘The Knight’s Tomb’ is quoted Authorially to introduce the theme of the evanescence of chivalric splendour at the tournament in Ivanhoe (8: 78.43–79.11), and again in the most reckless of Scott’s anachronisms by the sexton of St Bride’s church with the deceased Douglas clan around in Castle Dangerous (23b: 93.32–34). As a reader’s acquaintance with the Waverley Novels widens, they will find that, to a greater or lesser extent, the allusions to particular authors and passages begin to have a cumulative effect. It then becomes a matter not just of the source text feeding into the novel, but of characters and incidents in the novels feeding into each other. When the novels first appeared this will originally have happened mainly in chronological order, and students of Scott need always to bear this in mind. But with rereading, earlier novels will have begun to be nourished by later ones. For the modern reader, who will very likely encounter the novel in a fairly random order, such enriching connections may occur independent of the chronological sequence from the outset.

Notes 1 See e.g. Lidia Garbin’s tracing of an extraordinary density of Shakespearean allusion in one of Elshie’s speeches in The Black Dwarf (4a: 44.23–45.7), linking him with Richard of Gloucester and Caliban and emphasising his complaint of ingratitude: ‘Literary Giants and Black Dwarfs’, Scottish Studies Review, 1:1 (Winter 2000), 78–93 (90: note 18). 2 The two novels densest in literary allusions overall are The Tale of Old Mortality and Woodstock, largely because of their many biblical references. They have on average nearly two allusions per page. The other novels rank thus in descending order: The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Rob Roy, The Antiquary, Waverley, Peveril of the Peak, The Fortunes of Nigel, The Bride of Lammermoor, Redgauntlet, Ivanhoe, The Abbot, Saint Ronan’s Well, Kenilworth, Chronicles of the Canongate, Guy Mannering, The Pirate, The Monastery, The Talisman, The Black Dwarf, A Legend of the Wars of

Intertexts  153 Montrose, The Betrothed, Count Robert of Paris, Quentin Durward, The Fair Maid of Perth, Castle Dangerous, and Anne of Geierstein, the last with just over 150 allusions in its 400-odd pages. 3 In his review of Waverley Francis Jeffrey uses the term ‘smart’ with disapproval: ‘The passages in which the author speaks in his own person, and assumes the smart and flippant style of modern makers of paragraphs, are … considerably below mediocrity’: Edinburgh Review, 24 (November 1814), 242. This was to be a recurrent complaint in reviews of subsequent novels, particularly those with playful introductions. Scott himself uses the term ‘smartish’ of the Introduction to Chronicles of the Canongate in a letter to Robert Cadell of 2 May [1827]: Letters, 10.199. 4 The novel densest in biblical allusion is The Tale of Old Mortality with over 400 in its 353 pages, followed at some distance by Woodstock, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Ivanhoe, and Peveril of the Peak, the last with some 230 allusions in its 495 pages. The remaining novels line up in the following descending order: The Talisman, The Abbot, The Monastery, Redgauntlet, Rob Roy, Chronicles of the Canongate, The Fair Maid of Perth, The Antiquary, The Bride of Lammermoor, Count Robert of Paris, Kenilworth, Waverley, A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, The Pirate, The Fortunes of Nigel, The Betrothed, Saint Ronan’s Well, Guy Mannering, The Black Dwarf, Anne of Geierstein, Quentin Durward, and Castle Dangerous, the last with hardly more than twenty allusions in its 208 pages. 5 John Buchan, Sir Walter Scott (London: Cassell, 1932), 350. 6 The verse is identical in the Authorised Version and the Book of Common Prayer. One should be aware that a familiar Prayer Book expression, ‘bounden duty’, was also common currency in Presbyterian Scotland, so there is nothing surprising in its being used by Middleburgh, Warden, and Holdenough as well as by Macwheeble from Episcopalian Tully-Veolan (6: 173.9; 10: 42.2; 19: 11.9–10; 1: 335.22). 7 Graham Tulloch, ‘Ivanhoe and Bibles’, in Carnival, 309–19 (312). 8 4b: 281.5; 6: 94.15; 8: 339.19; 9: 302.40. 9 The frequency table continues as follows: between 99 and 50 1 Kings, Judges, Job, Jeremiah, 1 Corinthians, Acts, Romans, 2 Samuel, and John; and between 49 and 30 2 Kings, Ecclesiastes, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Hebrews, Ephesians, Ezekiel, Mark, Daniel, and 2 Corinthians. 10 For an extensive and sensible Victorian survey of Scott’s use of the entire Bible see Nicholas Dickson, The Bible in Waverley, or Sir Walter Scott’s Use of the Sacred Scriptures (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1884), and for another sensible but much shorter treatment James Moffat, The Bible in Scots Literature (London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1924]), Chapter 6 ‘Sir Walter Scott’ (233–83). 11 Journal, 252. 12 Letters, 10.450–51: to Allan Cunningham, 28 June [1828]. For the Shakespeare bust, which arrived in 1816 with a specially designed pedestal, see Letters, 4.289 (to Daniel Terry, 12 November 1816), and 295–96 (to J. B. S. Morritt, 22 November 1816). 13 Kenilworth and Woodstock both have some 160 allusions to Shakespeare in their 400-odd pages. After The Antiquary, Saint Ronan’s Well, Waverley, and Guy Mannering come, in descending order of density, The Pirate, Rob Roy, Redgauntlet, The Abbot, The Bride of Lammermoor, Peveril of the Peak, The Black Dwarf, Ivanhoe, The Fortunes of Nigel, The Betrothed, Chronicles of the Canongate, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, Quentin Durward, The Tale of Old Mortality, The Talisman, The Fair Maid of Perth, Anne of Geierstein, Count Robert of Paris,

154 Intertexts

14

15

16 17 18

19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

The Monastery, and Castle Dangerous, the last with some twenty allusions in its 208 pages. Nicola J. Watson, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, in Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy: Great Shakespeareans, Volume V, ed. Adrian Poole (London: Continuum, 2011), 10–52 (22). See also Watson’s article concentrating on Woodstock, ‘Kemble, Scott, and the Mantle of the Bard’, in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 73–92. Address to the 1958 Annual Dinner of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club, printed in the 51st Annual Report, and reprinted in Sir Walter Scott 1771–1832: An Edinburgh Keepsake, ed. Allan Frazer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 109–22 (110). E.g. 11: 1–11; 22: 203.16–28; 5: 69.27; 6: 226.8; 13: 386.19. 1: 141.38; 10: 207.7. See e.g. D. Biggins, ‘Measure for Measure and The Heart of Midlothian’, Études Anglaises, 14 (1961), 193–205, and Catherine Jones, Literary Memory: Scott’s Waverley Novels and the Psychology of Narrative (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 59–74; Frank McCombie, ‘Scott, Hamlet, and The Bride of Lammermoor’, Essays in Criticism, 25 (1975), 419–36; Judith Lewin, ‘Jewish Heritage and Secular Inheritance in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 19:1 (Winter 2006), 27–33; and David Simpson, ‘“Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?”: Friends and Enemies in Walter Scott’s Crusader Novels’, Studies in Romanticism, 47 (2008), 437–52. For other references to Shakespeare on the stage see The Heart of Mid-­ Lothian (6: 170.39–41), where Madge ‘sprung out of the room, as the witches in Macbeth used, in less refined days, to seem to fly upwards from the stage’, and Saint Ronan’s Well for ‘Dame Quickly’s piqued hat and green apron’ (16: 11.23), and for Winterblossom’s ‘seal-ring as large as Sir John Falstaff’s’ (29.18–19). See Oliver S. Buckton, ‘“This Monstrous Passion”: Teaching The Bride of Lammermoor and Queer Theory’, in Gottlieb, 157–63. See Christopher Whyte, ‘Queer Readings, Gay Texts from Redgauntlet to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, in Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness, ed. Marco Fazzini (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 159–75 (164–70). Millgate, 77. See 2: 70.17–19. 8: 165.7–8; Reed, 17.541. 18b: 98.2; Reed, 11.224. The alternatives, by Steevens and Douce, are found in Reed, 5.296. Robert K. Gordon, ‘Shakespeare and Some Scenes in the Waverley Novels’, Queen’s Quarterly, 45 (1938–39), 478–85 (481). Gordon has another speculative comparison, between Mary in The Abbot and Lady Macbeth (482–83). For Wilmon C. Brewer’s assiduous but speculative comparing and contrasting of Scott’s plots with Shakespeare’s see his Shakespeare’s Influence on Sir Walter Scott (Boston, MA: Cornhill, 1925). Millgate, 77. Approximate numbers for each of the plays with thirty or more allusions are as follows (in descending order): Hamlet 230, Macbeth 170, 1 Henry IV 160, King Lear 120, 2 Henry IV 100, Othello 90, Henry V 90, Twelfth Night 90, The Merry Wives of Windsor 70, As You Like It 70, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 60, Much Ado about Nothing 60, The Merchant of

Intertexts  155

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39

40

Venice 60, Romeo and Juliet 60, Richard II 50, Richard III 50, The Tempest 50, Julius Caesar 50, King John 40, Measure for Measure 30, Love’s Labour’s Lost 30, and The Taming of the Shrew 30. See especially 11: 1.25, 2.9–10, 3.40–42, 8.26–27, 22.32, 27.7, 85.2. The words are also used without any reference to rebellion in The Heart of Mid-Lothian and The Pirate (6: 207.21; 12: 18.31). 2: 200.2–4, 203.43, 204.37, 209.19, 231.13 and 39–43, 310.37–38. The phrase is also used with little or no reference to the original dream context for the military exercises of Fergus’s men in Waverley (1: 101.39–40). David Craig, Scottish Literature and the Scottish People 1680–1830 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 24. Graham Tulloch, ‘Scott and the Creation of Dialogue in Scots’, in Sir Walter Scott: The Long-Forgotten Melody, ed. Alan Bold (London: Vision Press, 1983), 143–66 (145). In The Bride of Lammermoor (7a: 191.43), The Fortunes of Nigel (13: 388.16), and The Fair Maid of Perth (21: 51.38). The two characters’ fondness for proverbs help to make Rob Roy the densest of the novels in this respect, with some 170 examples in its 343 pages. It is followed at some distance by The Fortunes of Nigel, The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Saint Ronan’s Well, and Redgauntlet, the last with 100 examples in 380 pages. The remaining novels line up in descending order as follows: The Antiquary, The Abbot, Kenilworth, The Pirate, The Black Dwarf, The Tale of Old Mortality, Guy Mannering, Waverley, Woodstock, The Monastery, Peveril of the Peak, Chronicles of the Canongate, A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, Quentin Durward, Ivanhoe, The Betrothed, The Fair Maid of Perth, The Talisman, Anne of Geierstein, Count Robert of Paris, and Castle Dangerous, the last with just ten proverbs. The other proverbs are at 6: 320.12 and 24. This proverbial usage is noted by Janet Sorensen, ‘“Something Glee’d”: The Uses of Language in Scott’s Waverley Novels’, in Gottlieb, 38–49 (41). See the listings on the internet site referred to at the end of the Prefatory Notes. The authors most frequently alluded to are Milton (nearly 150), Virgil (over 100), Horace and Dryden (around ninety), Burns, Pope, Chaucer, and Spenser (around seventy), Cervantes and Jonson (around sixty), Coleridge and Homer (around fifty), Johnson (around forty), and Ovid, Butler, Swift, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and Byron (around thirty). Waverley and The Antiquary are the two novels densest in references excluding the Bible, Shakespeare, and proverbs, with some 270 and 260 apiece. They are followed, at a distance, in descending order by Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Fortunes of Nigel, Chronicles of the Canongate, The Bride of Lammermoor, Saint Ronan’s Well, Guy Mannering, The Monastery, Redgauntlet, Peveril of the Peak, Woodstock, Castle Dangerous, A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, Ivanhoe, The Abbot, The Black Dwarf, The Pirate, Kenilworth, The Tale of Old Mortality, The Betrothed, Count Robert of Paris, Quentin Durward, The Talisman, The Fair Maid of Perth, and Anne of Geierstein, the last with some forty general literary allusions. Several of the characters recall their early experience of Virgil, at first hand or by way of examples in grammatical textbooks: Sir Arthur Wardour in The Antiquary (3: 46.6–8), Sir Dugald Dalgetty in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (7b: 46.33–35), Chiffinch in Peveril of the Peak (14: 280.3–4), and Mowbray in Saint Ronan’s Well (16: 100.29).

156 Intertexts 41 See J. H. Alexander, ‘“Only Connect”: The Passionate Style of Walter Scott’, Scottish Literary Journal, 6:2 (December 1979), 37–54 (46), responding to E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1927), 52. 42 Bruce Stovel, ‘Waverley and the Aeneid: Scott’s Art of Allusion’, English Studies in Canada, 11 (1985), 26–39 (38). 43 Lockhart, 1.41; 7.370. 4 4 Lockhart, 7.370. 45 The epigram appears on the versos of the half-titles of all four volumes of the first series, and on the versos of the title-pages of all four volumes of the second series. It appears on the verso of the half-title of the first two volumes of the third series. 46 Hayden, 118. 47 E. Michael Gerli, ‘“Pray landlord, bring me those books”: Notes on Cervantes, Walter Scott, and the Ethical Legitimacy of the novel in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, in “Corónente tus hazañas”: Studies in Honor of John Jay Allen, ed. Michael J. McGrath (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2005), 231–42 (241). 48 17: 12.36–13.5, 13.31–33, 29.8–14, 71.38–40, 76.18–20. 49 The appropriateness of the change of ‘barren’ to ‘foreign’ is queried in the eewn note (578), but the inverted commas which distinguish ‘foreign’ may be taken to signify more than the simple change of word. 50 2: 3.7–13: for the affinities between Johnson’s style and Scott’s here see Robert C. Gordon, Under Which King?: A Study of the Scottish Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969), 28. 51 Jonathan Wordsworth suggested that ‘Hart-Leap Well’ echoes Scott’s translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s Lenore as ‘The Chase’ in 1796: see J. H. Alexander, ‘Scott’s “The Chase” and Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well”’, The Scott Newsletter, 9 (Winter 1986), 10–13. 52 For a full and valuable discussion see David Chandler, ‘Scott’s Saint Ronan’s Well and Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well”’, Notes and Queries, 51 (2004), 152–57. 53 In a letter of 20 October 1824 to an unknown correspondent Coleridge notes: ‘Here follow the Lines first written down but very incorrectly by Sir W. Scott in one of his Novels – who had them from J. H. Frere to whom I had repeated them as an experiment in metre that had passed thro’ my brain’ (Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971), 5.380–81).

7 Novels

Each novel in the Waverley series has its own distinct timbre or texture. The present study has argued that this owes much to the predominating historical and literary sources, and the topographical settings, explored in greater or lesser detail in the Historical Note and explanatory notes of each eewn volume, along with distinctive patterns in the pervasive imagery. This chapter offers a set of thumbnail textural sketches of the novels in sequence to hint at some of the ways in which the sources feed in to the matrix investigated in previous chapters, producing the unique reading experience each work affords, and contributing to its thematic force. For Waverley Scott had access to a wealth of written and oral accounts of the 1745 Uprising. None of them predominates, but each plays its part in ensuring historical density, and some of them contribute telling details, such as Colonel Gardiner’s being ‘brought from his horse by the blow of a scythe’ taken from a 1747 memoir (1: 241.36–37), or Fergus’s concluding ‘God save King James!’ echoing the account in the Caledonian Mercury of a similar execution in 1746 (350.17–18). Scott has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sources for particular passages, as when the Memoirs of … Donald Macleod, published in 1791, are enlisted for the Highland feast in Chapter 20 (103.20–104.16). Coleman O. Parsons finds here a typical example of Scott’s way with such source material: ‘He takes a picturesque scene in which the figures are almost consciously awaiting the breath of life and animates it by dialogue, action, and conflict or contrast of personalities’.1 This first novel is enriched by nearly 500 textual allusions.2 The ­biblical references include concentrated deployment by the Cameronian ­Gilfillan in Chapter 36, anticipated by the lower-voltage Ebenezer C ­ ruickshank in Chapter 29, and followed in contrasting mode by the Baron of Bradwardine’s repeated references to his hideaway as his ­Patmos, helping to consolidate Chapters 65, 67, and 70. Gaelic ­proverbs from ­Donald Macintosh’s 1785 collection characterise the speech patterns of Evan Dhu and Fergus, and in briefer appearances both Lieutenant Jinker and Baillie Macwheeble provide Lowland equivalents. Colonel Talbot’s fundamentally conventional nature is emphasised by a set of adages  in  Chapter 62. For

158 Novels the most part the Shakespearean allusions involve expressions or bonding exchanges rather than fulfilling clear thematic functions, but there are exceptions. As Ruth Beckett has shown, Talbot’s character shadows that of Lord Talbot in 1 Henry VI. Both are unselfish military men of honour, patriotically English to a fault, the colonel for better or worse a professional soldier rather than chivalric in the old sense of the word.3 Flora uses Waverley’s Romeo and Juliet recital to reinforce her advocacy of Rose’s claim to his affections. A number of references to 1 Henry IV link Waverley, Fergus, and Hotspur as rebels,4 and in contrast there two possible linkings of the Young Pretender and his forces with Henry V and his (160.18–19, 208.17). Towards the end of the novel Waverley’s maturing is emphasised by the recurrence of the ‘big wars’ passage from Othello, when he self-consciously bids farewell to his military career, such as it was (309.32–42), prompting the reader to recall two early allusions bolstering an idealised view of military activity (24.46 and 33.31–32, both ironically alluding to the termination of Othello’s career). At the very end there is a further telling reference to the same play when there was ‘scarce a gentleman who was “in hiding,” after the battle of Culloden, but could tell a tale of strange concealments, and of wild and hair’s-breadth ’scapes, far more extravagant than any I have ascribed to my heroes’ (364.4–7). When compared with later novels Waverley is one of the most Classicised, with Bradwardine’s allusions discussed earlier supplemented by over twenty Classical images. In his last meeting with Waverley Fergus imitates the pedant, citing the Aeneid with poignant wit: I hope they will set it [my head] on the Scotch gate though, that I may look, even after death, to the blue hills of my own country, that I love so well. The Baron would have added, Moritur, et moriens dulces reminiscitur Argos. (348.42–349.3) Ariosto and Spenser connect with persistent images of enchantment to emphasise Waverley’s romanticising tendency. Repeated references to Dryden and Cervantes probably owe more to Scott’s taste for those writers than to any cumulative thematic significance, though Fergus says that Dryden is Waverley’s favourite poet (135.23–27), and MacIvor’s own evident fondness for Cervantes touches by implication on the pervasive theme of delusion. Most prominent of all the miscellaneous literary references are those to ballads: centring on Davie Gellatley they spill out into the narrative more generally. Conspicuous in the spillage are four allusions to Elizabeth Wardlaw’s spirited Hardyknute, contributing to the work’s developing élan.5 The energy becomes frighteningly fierce in Chapter 30 with the snatches of song screeched by the smith’s wife at Cairnvreckan (160.30–37, 162.16–19). Scott’s second and third novels, Guy Mannering and The Antiquary, written with remarkable speed, lack entirely the dense historical

Novels  159 particularity of their predecessor. They are constructed largely from materials familiar to Scott at first hand, or close second hand, even if the details are to some extent subject to conjecture. For a number of areas central to the distinctive timbre of the novels, though, Scott depended to a greater or lesser extent on written sources. In Guy Mannering the astrological authorities invoked and procedures described as Mannering jousts with Sampson in Chapter 3, and in the related passage at the beginning of the next chapter, derive from Lilly’s Christian Astrology of 1647.6 For the gypsy component Scott had a set of three useful printed sources: a number of the Spectator by Addison, a Dissertation on the Gipseys by Heinrich Grellmann, and an article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, ‘Notices concerning the Scottish Gypsies’, partly of his own composition, featuring inter alia the tribe at Kirk Yetholm (this last is quoted extensively in the Magnum Introduction and notes).7 He also drew on Richard Brome’s 1641 play A Jovial Crew; or, the Merry Beggars for gypsy cant (544: note to 149.18). With Waverley and The Antiquary (and later Kenilworth, Saint Ronan’s Well, and Woodstock), Guy Mannering is unusually dense in allusions to Shakespeare, and more than a third of the mottoes are taken from his plays.8 Shakespearean clusters are associated with Pleydell and his Falstaffian High Jinks persona, drawing on 1 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor in particular; with the passage of time, and Dinmont as Autolycus, referring to The Winter’s Tale; with Meg Merrilees as witch complete with Macbeth cauldron in Chapter 46; and (framing much of the narrative) with Mannering as Prospero abandoning his assumed role as astrologer (2: 21.18–22, 298.28–29). Jane Millgate has observed a contrast between the completeness of Shakespearean romance and the ‘irreversible consequences’ of Mannering’s mistakes.9 Many of the proverbial sayings are distributed lightly among several speakers, notably Dandie Dinmont, Pleydell, and Meg who specialises in portentous adages, one of which (‘meddle not and make not’) Hatteraick recognises as a favourite of hers (193.27–28: compare 123.37 and 145.29). The few biblical allusions in this novel are overwhelmingly from the mouth of Dominie Sampson, or associated with him, sometimes expressing his deepest feelings, sometimes eliciting affectionate amusement from the reader. Authors other than Shakespeare unusually prominent in Guy Mannering are Horace, Crabbe, Fletcher, and Pope. Although individually telling, the Fletcher and Pope allusions have little accumulated force. The references to Horace are equally distributed between Pleydell and Dominie Sampson, emphasising the urbane nature of the former and the learning of the latter. The prominence given to Crabbe, including three mottoes, may counterbalance to some extent the sense of unrelenting fatality that pervades the work (a sense reinforced by the predominance of images of machines and warfare), especially in the epigraph to Chapter 55 with its emphasis on Providence (335.17–21). Although not numerous, the allusions to Burns are professionally and topographically

160 Novels apposite. The excise link between poet and novel is evident in the motto to Chapter 9 and Kennedy’s whistling of ‘the deil’s awa wi’ the exciseman’ three pages later (48.31–33). There is a regional appropriateness in the earlier rhythmic echo of ‘John Anderson My Jo’ (30.32) and the motto to Chapter 49 from ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ (296.24–26). The two mottoes from Burns are part of a substantial eighteenth-century representation, constituting more than a quarter of the epigraphs and reinforcing the period atmosphere. In The Antiquary Oldbuck’s discourse and his disputes with Sir Arthur Wardour (mainly in the first volume) are infused with references to, and material derived from, antiquarian books that Scott had at his elbow, most notably Alexander Gordon’s Itinerarium Septentrionale, of which we caught a passing glimpse earlier in this study: the Antiquary sports a newly acquired copy at the beginning of the novel (3: 9.35–10.2).10 Dousterswivel’s mumbo-jumbo in the second volume makes particular use of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, as Scott acknowledges in a Magnum note.11 This novel is unique in the series in that one character is responsible for a large number of the plentiful literary allusions.12 Jonathan Oldbuck specialises in witty echoes of Shakespearean and other Classical and more recent literature, in all of which the work is exceptionally rich. Although Oldbuck particularly favours Hamlet, Macbeth, and the Henry IV plays, there is no special significance in most of the choices: the expressions he toys with are usually taken largely out of context. The main exception, and it is an important one, is the series of parallels, open or implied, between himself as Falstaff, Lovel as Prince Hal, and Hector as Hotspur. His Classical allusions are mostly in his usual witty mode, with Cicero, Homer, Ovid, and Virgil prominent. More than once, though, his favourite Classical author Horace comes to mind in moments of seriousness: he cites with approval the famous advocacy of ‘æquam servare mentem’ (154.6–7), bears in mind his ancestor’s motto ‘expressive … of that firmness of mind and tenacity of purpose, recommended by Horace’ (85.23–27), and hopes that he and Sir Arthur will have ‘many better seasons for jesting – desipere in loco [[it is pleasant] to play the fool in [due] place] is the maxim of Horace’ (331.15–17). For the deepest expression of personal feeling he resorts to Wordsworth’s ‘The Fountain’, which is significantly matched on the next page by a stanza from Sheridan’s ‘Ah! cruel maid’ applied Authorially to Lovel (75.15–22, 76.39–42). He also has strong sidelines in proverbs and (usually jocular) biblical references: a rare exception to the prevailing lightness of tone is his lament for the way in which ‘our sources of common pleasure gradually dry up as we journey on through the vale of Bacha’, drawing on Psalm 84, linked with a gloomy Juvenalian sentiment (124.17–25). Edie comes closest to matching the Antiquary in biblical allusions, though his are almost invariably deeply serious, most

Novels  161 tellingly as he attempts to dissuade Lovel and Hector from their absurd duel (161.39–162.4); he is also Oldbuck’s only rival in proverbial expertise in the second half of the novel. The Black Dwarf returns to the politically enmeshed Jacobite world of Waverley, with which Scott was thoroughly inward. As the eewn Historical Note indicates there are particular debts to George Lockhart of Carnwath’s Memoirs and Robert Patten’s History of the Late Rebellion.13 Scott acknowledged in a Magnum note that he had derived the troop of freebooters including ‘the notorious Luck-in-a Bag’ from Patten (25a: 166.9–31). This is the least dense of the early novels in literary allusions.14 Not until Quentin Durward is its referential sparseness matched. Like the later work, though on a novella scale, The Black Dwarf is a spare and efficient narrative, in spite of its reputation as something of an abortion. Proverbial usages are distributed fairly evenly among the main characters, but biblical references cluster in what is in effect a contest between Elshie and Hobbie’s grannie, though the two do not meet. In Chapter 4 Elshie draws a fearful misanthropic apocalyptic vision from Job (4a: 33.22–28), as well as contempt for men who are as ‘the beasts that perish’, adopting a phrase from Psalm 49, before culminating with a wish to assume the role of God with absolute power over frail potsherds (35.1–20): these fit in well with the extravagant imagery of ‘his own metaphorical style’ (110.5). Six chapters later Mrs Elliot employs three biblical allusions in her adjuration to Hobbie against associating with the Dwarf (69.41–70.5): her language is not far distant from that used by Jedidiah Cleishbotham in his attack on critics in the Introduction to the novel (6.22–26)! Elsewhere Mrs Elliot is given to recommending comfort and consolation in language influenced by Scripture.15 No fewer than nine of the mottoes (half the total) are taken from Shakespeare. That to Chapter 13, from 1 Henry IV (85.26–31), hints at the inherent instability of the forces of rebellion, following on from Marischal’s devil-may-care quotation of Falstaff from the same play at the end of the previous chapter (85.6–10) and reinforced by his loose adaptation of Henry V three pages later ‘in a theatrical tone of affected heroism’ (88.17–20). There is also a link with the implicit parallel between the transgressive Falstaff and Willie of Westburnflat (the Red Reiver) in the motto to Chapter 6 from the earlier play (42.9–12). The effectiveness of the last three mottoes, all Shakespearean, was noted earlier in this study. A distinctive timbre is given to the novel by a number of passing echoes of the ballads and editorial commentary in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in single words and short phrases, and in proper names.16 Although The Tale of Old Mortality is set three generations before Waverley it gives a similar impression of historical depth. Much of its distinctive feel comes from the combination of its locations on the

162 Novels border between the fertile and the barren in upper Clydesdale17 with a set of published sources for the Covenanting period. Probably the most important of the latter is Robert Wodrow’s History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland (1721–22) which Scott asked William ­Blackwood to send him shortly before he started composition.18 The eewn explanatory notes frequently cite Wodrow in support of historical details, and some of the debts involve specific verbal echoes.19 The novel is also particularly indebted to Patrick Walker’s memoir of Alexander Peden (1724), 20 and to witnesses that Scott himself edited, the Memoirs of Captain John Creichton compiled by Swift, 21 and Lord Somerville’s Memorie of the Somervilles. 22 This novel is unique in the extent to which its unusually generous references to other texts are dominated by the Bible. Over two-thirds of its 650-odd allusions, atypically peaking in the second volume, are biblical. 23 The majority of these are woven together in virtuoso displays by the Covenanters, for which Scott drew on an established Episcopalian satirical tradition and his own substantial collection of Covenanting pamphlets. 24 The deafened reader may well fail to register after one of these performances, by Burley in Chapter 6, Morton’s reference to Ecclesiastes, talking to himself after the fanatic’s departure: ‘can I be a man, and a Scotchman, and look with indifference on that persecution which has made wise men mad?’ (4b: 47.2–3). Less likely to be missed is his crucial rebuke to Burley in Chapter 21: I revere the Scriptures as deeply as you or any Christian can do. I look into them with humble hope of extricating a rule of conduct and a law of salvation. But I expect to find this by an examination of their general tenor, and of the spirit which they uniformly breathe, and not by wresting particular passages from their context, or by the application of Scriptural phrases to circumstances and events with which they have often very slender relation. (170.15–21) Morton’s position is endorsed by the Author in Chapter 37 in his account of the extreme non-conformists after the Glorious Revolution who to support their ‘narrow-spirited doctrine … cited various texts, all, as it may well be supposed, detached from their context, and most of them derived from the charges given to the Jews in the Old Testament dispensation to extirpate idolaters out of the promised land’ (287.8–11). His name notwithstanding, the moderate divine Poundtext takes a similar view (218.38–40). It is significant that Morton, under threat of imminent death, resorts to the Book of Common Prayer, and that Macbriar’s recognition of the source prompts Meiklewrath to advance the clock hand to midnight (264.30–265.9). Old Mortality has only a handful of allusions to Shakespeare, individually effective but of no cumulative significance, but there are

Novels  163 substantially more proverbial utterances. One would expect the townpiper and publican Niel Blane and his daughter Jenny to be fond of adages, and so they are. Cuddie is the most consistently proverbial speaker: the mode comes more naturally to him than the biblical quotations he has learnt from his mother. The chilling use of aphorisms by authority figures on both sides of the ideological divide was noted in the previous chapter. Of the references to authors other than Shakespeare in this work by far the most cumulatively significant are those to Butler’s Hudibras and Ben Jonson, reinforcing the pronounced loading of the novel against the Covenanters. As the eewn Essay on the Text and Historical Note for Rob Roy point out, Scott’s profound knowledge of Jacobite history is of only marginal relevance to that novel, which is ‘largely invention’ (5: 352, 475). The two most prominent non-literary source texts operate in particular passages: Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce in the second chapter, 25 and Richard Burn’s The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer in Chapters 7 to 9. 26 Although Scott was personally acquainted with the southern central Highlands some of his topographical descriptions echo Patrick Graham’s Sketches Descriptive of the Picturesque Scenery of Perthshire,27 and a manuscript known to him and later published in the 1822 edition of Edmund Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland provided useful sociological details.28 Rob Roy has the densest concentration of proverbial sayings of any of the novels. 29 It is no surprise that Andrew Fairservice and Bailie Jarvie are given to gnomicisms. J. Derrick McClure finds David Murison’s observation on aphorisms in general particularly applicable to the Bailie’s usages, which are not always well received: ‘A repertoire of proverbs embodies the group morality of a somewhat wordly sort based on the main idea of making life’s journey with the maximum avoidance of trouble’. 30 Worldly and trouble-avoiding Jarvie may be, but often he uses proverbs with immense energy, witness two in quick succession in Chapter 27: ‘Mattie had ill will to see me set awa’ on this ride, and grat awee the silly tawpie; but it’s nae mair ferlie to see a woman greet than to see a goose gang barefit’, and ‘That child’s aye for being out o’ the cheese-fat he was moulded in’ (223.25–28, 39–40). At first sight it is more surprising that Rob Roy should also be fond of adages, notably in Chapters 25, 34, and 35 (201.26–203.36, 287.29–305.5), though already his second utterance uses the proverbial ‘bought and sold’, meaning ‘cheated’ (29.33). But it is the clearest evidence of his kinship with Jarvie, spiritual as much as familial: for all their differences they share an imperturbability rooted in their understanding of the way the world works. Frank stresses Rob’s ‘caution and shrewdness’ (32.10–11 and 39, 33.1). He and Jarvie address each other naturally in proverbial terms, though they never exchange adages in flyting mode (that is left to Jarvie and Fairservice: 220.20–28).

164 Novels The immense difference between Rob and his wife Helen is reinforced by the complete absence of aphorisms from her ‘graceful, flowing, and declamatory’ utterances, as the Author puts it in the course of an extended discussion of the pair’s speech patterns, partly similar, partly distinct (308.2). Jarvie’s and Fairservice’s proverbs in particular are supplemented by biblical phrases appropriate to their Presbyterian persuasion: significantly, on their first meeting Fairservice offers Frank the Presbyterian right hand of fellowship, a custom deriving from Galatians (50.28). But, as McClure notes, whereas Fairservice’s biblical usages ‘usually have overtones of hostility’ Jarvie’s are mostly ‘kindly in tone’. 31 The literary allusions that enable Author and reader, as well as character and character (notably Frank and Die), to bond are a cause of alienation between Frank and his father, and potentially between Frank and Jarvie who takes the hero to be a stage actor addicted to useless literary pursuits (16–17, 185.29–186.16). Frank and Die share Shakespearean allusions, most strikingly as part of a remarkable sequence from Othello. The motto to Chapter 12 preparing the way for Frank’s drunken attack on Rashleigh, the source of much of the ill that follows in the novel, likens his behaviour to Cassio’s (98.16–18), but the next morning it is Rashleigh who in massive deception says that ‘I have only, like poor Cassio, a very vague recollection of the confusion of last night – remember a mass of things, but nothing distinctly – a quarrel, but nothing wherefore’ (103.3–6). The ball then passes to Die, who reminds Frank when he quotes Shakespeare’s ‘good familiar creature’ to palliate his conduct that the sentiment is expressed by Iago (106.1–10). All of this may be recalled when with grim inevitability the dying Rashleigh ‘shut his eyes, as if determined, like Iago, to speak no word more’ (340.17–19). It is difficult to know whether there is any particular significance in Frank’s choice of mottoes for his narrative. Although he has Frank flag up the device at the beginning of Chapter 3 (22.29–33), the Author notes in the Advertisement that ‘the mottoes for the Chapters have been selected without any reference to the supposed date of the incidents. For these, of course, the Editor is responsible’ (3.26–29). The heavy, perhaps excessive, emotional weight carried by the mottoes on Glasgow Cathedral and the bridge and tollbooth (Chapters 19 to 22) might be attributed to the fraught nature of Frank’s narrative, as might the strange application of the motto to Chapter 16 preparing for the sign of a visitor in the library area. On the whole, though, it would seem best to consider the mottoes as Authorial, with Frank’s comment at the beginning of Chapter 3 as a one-off effect.32 The Heart of Mid-Lothian has claims to be regarded as the richest of the entire series. Scott is intimately acquainted with his native Edinburgh, and familiar with the Great North Road and London. He is equally inward with the Scottish legal authorities and procedures that determine

Novels  165 much of the flavour of the opening chapter and the trial scenes with their accompanying commentary by Saddletrees. David Deans’s rhetoric is saturated with echoes of, and allusions to, an author already enlisted for The Tale of Old Mortality, Patrick Walker: these range from single words and short expressions like ‘heaven-daring’ (6: 104.40), ‘roundspun presbyterian’ (112.25), and ‘nation-wasting and church-sinking abomination’ (103.2–3), to longer speeches and anecdotes such as Deans’s attack on dancing (88.22–89.6) and the ‘apparition of a tall black man’ (136.5–17), both of the last being acknowledged in Magnum notes.33 For the verbal texture of lower-class English speech in the second and third volumes Scott draws heavily on Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and Provincial Glossary. The density of scriptural allusion in The Heart of Mid-Lothian is exceeded only in The Tale of Old Mortality and Woodstock. There are 300 biblical references.34 Most of them occur in David Deans’s virtuoso utterances, starting with his very first full speech (74.19–30). These join the pervasive phrases and incidents drawn from Walker to constitute his staple rhetoric (592–93). Biblical texts that he uses, or that are applied to him, more than once indicate his central concerns. Paul’s adjuration against ‘keeping company’ in 1 Corinthians is enlisted to condemn Dumbiedikes senior in the course of a list of denigratory terms as a ‘profane company-keeper’ (75.33–34), but Deans fails to warn Effie sufficiently about such practical dangers as ‘chambering, company-­ keeping, and promiscuous dancing’, realising the consequences too late (90.40–41, 174.12). Drawing on the Psalms, Isaiah, and 1 Samuel, he is acutely conscious of the loss of his own status as a ‘polished shaft’ in the Kirk (103.31), with its precious ‘carved work’ always under threat (72.4, 90.36–37): ‘Ichabod’ – his glory has departed (198.4, 246.41). Deans trusts that Butler will become just such a polished shaft, and he does indeed fulfil this expectation in the final volume (74.26–27, 382.41–42). No doubt he would contrast Butler favourably with the lukewarm (173.35, 355.26) and the spiritually dead Gallios of the time (74.21–22):35 in the final volume he dismisses Knockdunder as a typical example (396.2). If Butler is ‘something ower proud o’ his carnal learning’ (as evidenced, presumably, in his habit of combining biblical and Classical allusions), he is essentially ‘a gude lad, and has the root of the matter’ (382.42–383.1), and not one of the ‘carnal seekers’ which are the curse of the Kirk (81.4–5).36 Jeanie has inherited her father’s habit of thinking in biblical terms, as is evident both in her speech and her letters to Deans and Butler in Chapter 29; but she is much more sparing and judicious in her use of Scripture, and more open to finding ‘the root of the matter’ in unexpected places (287.11), where her father would discern only ‘the instruction which causeth to err’ (282.41–283.1). She is firm and clear-sighted, though, in using the latter maxim as a defence against Robertson’s sophistry (298.8–11). Her exchange of biblical texts with

166 Novels the potentially repentant Madge in Chapter 31 (273.41–274.16) is effectively framed by her subsequent recollection and present recognition of the strength afforded by the Psalms in particular (267.1–8, 276.18–20). Sharing Jeanie’s upbringing, Effie has several varied and moving scriptural allusions in the Tolbooth scene in Chapter 21: but one of them, on the necessity of forgiving enemies, is uttered ‘with a timid look and a subdued voice, for her conscience told her what a different character the feelings with which she still regarded her seducer bore, compared with the Christian charity under which she attempted to veil it’ (187.3–7). The Heart of Mid-Lothian also has an unusual density of proverbial utterances, exceeded by only Rob Roy, The Fortunes of Nigel, and The Bride of Lammermoor. The characters principally involved are Mrs Saddletree and Ratcliffe in Edinburgh, Frank Levitt and the host at Newark (it is here Scott draws on Francis Grose), and Isaac Micklehose, one of the Knocktarlitie elders, in his cameo appearance at the end of Chapter 46 (403.32–404.3). The distinctive force of proverbs used by Effie and the Duke of Argyle was noted in the previous chapter. A modest quota of Shakespearean allusions is inevitably dominated by the histrionic Robertson, and he is given the first of six references to Measure for Measure, highlighting the common features, up to a point, of Jeanie and Isabella. The parallel set of correspondences between Jeanie and Christiana in The Pilgrim’s Progress has also often been noticed. Tony Inglis observes that along with Milton’s Comus Bunyan’s work plays a presiding role in the central part of the novel, taking over from Measure for Measure and yielding place in the final volume to Alexander Ross’s narrative poem Helenore.37 Coleridge provides a couple of Christiana/ Christabel jingles (136.38–39; 277.6–8). No fewer than five mottoes are taken from Crabbe, emphasising the unusually domestic and parochial focus of much of the narrative, culminating in the final volume. 38 One further prominent textural strand in this majestic novel consists of the profusion of scraps of traditional song, or imitations, centring on Madge Wildfire. The story of Janet Dalrymple, the original of Lucy Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor, had its origin in a blending of oral, printed, and manuscript sources laid bare in Scott’s Magnum Introduction (25a: 335–43; compare 7a: 333). There was also a ballad influence, from his translation of the German ‘Der edle Möringer’ with a pilgrim returning from abroad on the day his wife was about to marry another (7a: 337 (note 8)), and a contemporaneous quasi-folktale influence, again from the German, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué’s ‘Das Goldene Schloss’, which includes the dreamy young woman verging on feeble-mindedness and eventually driven to madness by intolerable pressure; the rival suitors, one the portentously profound last scion of a noble line, the other

Novels  167 an insensitive sportsman; the hunting motif; the rescue from animal peril of daughter and parent; the familiar behaviour beside a well in the forest; the blood spurting from a shot bird; the young woman’s persistent singing (this, by the way, reinforced from manuscript in the Edinburgh Edition text!); and her disconcerting smiles and laughter.39 A much more localised contribution to the texture from an obscure written source can be found in the hunting scene in Chapter 9 where Scott draws on details and a couplet from George Turbervile’s anonymous The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting, etc.: he owned the second edition published in 1611 (see the explanatory notes on pages 354 and 355). Most of the 300 literary allusions in The Bride40 are deployed with extreme clarity and almost clinical efficiency as part of a taut tragic work. The style is terse, certain key words recurring with relentless frequency: ‘house’, ‘honour’, ‘credit’, ‘friend’, ‘proud’, ‘haughty’, ‘stern’, ‘power’, ‘passion’, ‘revenge’, ‘blood’, ‘heart’, and ‘spot’. The numerous proverbial or sometimes quasi-proverbial utterances provide a context of normality, or what passes for normality, for the extraordinary story of Edgar Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton. Everyday popular wisdom infuses the adages of a group of working folk: the hunter Norman in Chapter 3; Mrs Lightbody and the Girders in Chapter 13 and the last part of Chapter 25 (208.41–210.16); and, more pervasively, Caleb Balderstone. A fondness for aphorisms fits with the blustering coarseness of Bucklaw and Craigengelt in Chapters 6, 7, and 16. Aphorisms are enlisted in the service of Realpolitik by Lord Turntippet, whose proclivity to ‘favourite saws’ virtually constitutes his rhetoric in Chapter 5 (47.5–34), and by the Marquis and his agent.41 A different sort of proverbial menace is evident in some of the utterances of the hags.42 As for the central couple, Edgar is very sparing in his use of adages, employing them to offer wise counsel to Bucklaw,43 and Lucy has only one late proverb and one quasi-proverb, in the pages preceding the verbal paralysis that overtakes her as the catastrophe approaches: ‘To sign and seal – to do and die!’ (232.27), and ‘When the diamonds are gone, what signifies the casket?’ (241.37–38). Other references are sparingly deployed. Biblical allusions characterise the speech patterns of Old Alice in prophetic mode in Chapter 19, the sexton intimate with marriage and death in Chapter 24, and Bidewell in Chapters 31 to 33, culminating in his reading of verses from Numbers, formidably italicised.44 The Shakespearean allusions are almost entirely Authorial, in the main text or the mottoes, with Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet prominent in the transparent but powerful thematic patterning of the work: Edgar and his castle infused with the character of Hamlet and the depiction of Elsinore, most strikingly in the opening funeral scene (20.14–22.10);45 the Ashtons seen in terms of Lady Macbeth and her husband;46 and the doomed lovers as Romeo

168 Novels and Juliet, two widely separated mottoes (36.20–22, 247.2–6) preparing the way for a final echo just before the second catastrophe (264.42–43). With some 140 literary allusions A Legend of the Wars of Montrose is the most sparsely elaborated of the novels in the first half of the series apart from The Black Dwarf, much of it consisting of historical analysis and straight narrative.47 The main contribution of allusions to the texture is Dalgetty’s combination of proverbial utterance with references to the Classics imbibed at Marischal College and the Authorised Version, liberally fortified with vocabulary and expressions from ­Robert ­Monro’s Expedition and, to a lesser extent, Sir James Turner’s Memoirs and Pallas Armata (7b: 219–21). The presentation of Highland culture as prone to sudden acts of brutal violence centres on Alexander Boswell’s Clan-­Alpin’s Vow, privately printed in 1811 (221–22). Although Shakespeare is enlisted for several military references, he contributes more strikingly to the evocation of the fey or uncanny element in the novel, culminating on the last page with a telling echo of The Tempest to embrace the act of fictional composition: Reader! The Tales of my Landlord are now finally closed, and it was my purpose to have addressed thee in the vein of Jedidiah Cleishbotham; but, like Horam the son of Asmar, and all other imaginary story-tellers, Jedidiah has melted into thin air.48 In Ivanhoe Scott moves with considerable daring well out of his comfort zone and has to depend on a limited set of historical authorities. He manages to create a compelling fictional world, if not a compelling historical analysis, by not worrying too much that ‘it is extremely probable that I may have confused the manners of two or three centuries’ (8: 12.8–10). That world, sparked into being by the confrontation of Saxons and Normans in John Logan’s 1783 tragedy Runnamede, or so the Magnum Introduction says (25b: 12.7–11), draws extensively on three substantial antiquarian works by Joseph Strutt, the fourteenth-century verse romance Richard Coeur de Lion, and (for the meeting of Richard and Friar Tuck) a ballad ‘The Kyng and the Hermyt’ of similar date (25b: 14.3–16.29). Yet another fourteenth-century import is Chaucer, who provides mottoes to introduce the Prior by way of the Monk in the General Prologue (8: 22.31–39), and the tournament by way of the Knight’s Tale (108.7–19),49 as well as a handful of expressions by characters and Author.50 A further crucial factor in the novel’s texture, in this case nearer to the date of the action, is the twelfth-century Templar Rule, especially prominent in the Grand Master’s utterances in Chapters 35 and 37. Half of the 450-plus literary allusions are biblical, serving to emphasise the division between Jewish and Christian characters. 51 As one would expect, Isaac and Rebecca draw almost exclusively on the Old

Novels  169 Testament to express their deepest feelings. In the final scene, though, Rebecca’s reference to the cultural ‘gulph’ between Rowena and herself inevitably recalls for the reader Luke’s story of Dives and Lazarus, introducing an appropriately apocalyptic dimension: it is not necessary to imagine that the allusion is conscious on Rebecca’s part (399.38–39), but Graham Tulloch observes she is several times likened to Christ by implication. 52 On the Christian side, Amaury and Beaumanoir draw on the whole Bible in support of their authority as Abbot and Grand Master respectively, calling ‘the iron-rod | Of tyrant power … power of God’ (319.10–11). Beaumanoir’s usage is influenced by the Templar Rule, most notably in his repeated references to the Devil as a roaring lion. 53 Friar Tuck’s scriptural citations are largely jocular, while Wamba’s in Chapter 26 tend to the approximate (210.28–40), and as observed in the previous chapter Bois-Guilbert shamelessly perverts the Old Testament in his approach to Rebecca (201.14–17). Many of the Shakespearean allusions are slight echoes, but the centrality of the Jewish characters makes it inevitable that The Merchant of Venice should feature prominently. Shylock’s lament (‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’) is used as the motto for Chapter 5 where Isaac first appears (46.20–26), but Scott has prepared the reader by having Templeton quote from the same speech in the Dedicatory Epistle, arguing for the essential uniformity of humankind across geographical and temporal boundaries: Our ancestors were not more distinct from us, surely, than Jews are from Christians; they had “eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions;” were “fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer” as ourselves. (10.37–42) Two further mottoes (to Chapters 6 and 22) and a witty Authorial usage at 239.41–43 serve to keep the play in almost every reader’s mind. 54 Ivanhoe is among the least proverbial of the novels, with Wamba the only character notably addicted to such utterances. Particularly notable are the jester’s employment of his favourite mode with ‘better look long before ye leap in the dark’ as he reveals his identity to the captive Cedric (212.1–2) and his neatly matched reaction to Gurth’s emancipation: Nay, … never think I envy thee, brother Gurth; the serf sits by the hall-fire when the freeman must forth to the field – And what saith Oldhelm of Malmesbury – Better a fool at a feast than a wise man in a fray. (274.9–12) The Introductory Epistle and the Answer by ‘The Author of Waverley’ in The Monastery are set apart from most of the narrative that follows

170 Novels by their density of textual allusion.55 In the body of the novel there are only some thirty-five allusions to Shakespeare, with a single outstanding example when Warden and Eustace meet for their momentous interview in Chapter 31 as ‘adverse champions, who do nothing in hate but all in honour’, echoing Othello’s words as he prepares to die (9: 288.19–21). There are twice as many proverbs, widely scattered but most concentrated in Chapter 13 with Elspet and the miller conveying sound folk wisdom, as Martin does in Chapter 17 (163.21, 164.17–18); elsewhere some of Shafton’s and Christie’s aphoristic usages help to define them as supercilious and coarse respectively. 56 Of far greater significance for an understanding of a number of the characters, though, are the biblical references. In Chapter 5 the force of Philip’s biblical attacks on heresy and defences of the Church’s authority, directed at Elspet, 57 is lessened by their following close on his jesting with Abbot Boniface about their duty ‘to comfort the widow’ following James (58.8–9). In the next chapter Boniface and Eustace are strongly contrasted. The Abbot uses Scripture to justify his indulgence (70.37–38), and to express his frustration at his treatment by his spiritual superior (71.15–16) and, more appropriately, his apprehensions of what may have happened to Philip (72.41–42). In contrast Eustace urges action against those ‘that turn the world upside down’ as in Acts (71.10). The distinction between Abbot and Sub-Prior is strongly reinforced by two allusions to well-known passages from Pope and Dryden: the former is linked with the somnolent ‘purple Abbots’ of The Dunciad (67.30–33) and the latter with Absalom’s ‘fiery soul’ (70.19–24). Two of the scriptural references by Eustace in subsequent chapters make it clear that his severity is tempered with compassion and mercy (83.31–33, 100.31–33). His application of Matthew’s ‘Where the treasure is will the heart be also’ to Sir Piercie Shafton is conclusive (159.13–15), and his expansion of ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will requite it’ in Romans to apply to the current sorry state of Border society is immensely eloquent (250.30–251.3). Later in the novel biblical citations become more frequent when Henry Warden appears on the scene. In the dispute between the reformer and the Sub-Prior in Chapter 31 Warden is allotted the majority of the scriptural citations: Eustace’s most telling and moving (though inaccurate) allusion is to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (290.17–23), building on the Author’s Othello reference. A cluster of biblical references prompted by Mary Avenel’s exploration of the ‘Black Book’ emphasises the Protestant bias of the narration (281.9–21). The standard use of scriptural imagery to designate the faithful as a vulnerable flock, employed with different effect by Philip (59.30: compare the motto at 57.2–9) and Eustace (302.27–30, 342.15–16) is part of a set of animal images which, though much less prominent than in Ivanhoe, is among the densest in the series. Allusions to works other than the Bible and Shakespeare play several important roles in this novel. In addition to the references to Pope,

Novels  171 Dryden, and Ariosto, there are echoes of Jonson and Sidney as part of the pseudo-Euphuistic speech allotted to Sir Piercie Shafton. 58 As observed in the previous chapter, Scott twice enlists Coleridge in attempts to render the White Lady more atmospheric by drawing on ‘Christabel’ (112.36–38) and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (119.16–21). Patricia Harkin suggests that the White Lady with her Coleridgean infusion can be read as the profound source of Halbert’s regulated imagination as opposed to the ill-regulated imagination of Shafton. 59 But Jane Millgate notes that Shafton and the White Lady ‘seem to be escapees from some other literary realm’.60 That is likely to be the experience of most readers, though for A. N. Wilson she is ‘one of the most powerful elements in the novel’.61 The adaptation of Collins’s Ode to Fear as the motto to Chapter 4 (48.20–24) sets the stage for a more successful excursion into the supernatural with Mary’s reported encounter with her late father. More convincingly, too, a wide range of texts associated with the Borders and the south of Scotland is invoked, ranging from the Bannatyne manuscript to Scott’s own Lay of the Last Minstrel.62 The Monastery and The Abbot were originally conceived as a single work, but they are worlds apart in their use of sources. With its very limited topographical scope The Monastery draws on Scott’s familiarity with local history already displayed in the editorial matter of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and the notes to The Lay of the Last Minstrel, whereas The Abbot depends on an extensive collection of historical works from John Knox onwards, especially those dealing with Mary Queen of Scots. The presentation of the Abbot of Misrule in Chapter 14 acquires vigorous detail from the recent antiquarian labours of Joseph Strutt and Francis Douce, while Dr Lundin’s professional jargon in Chapters 26 and 27 draws on Richard Whitlock’s Zōotomia published in 1654. Most of the Shakespearean borrowings are expressions forming part of the constructed period speech.63 The two staged performances in the novel, the Misrule procession in the first volume and the representation at the fair which opens the last volume, attract references to the plays within plays in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet, as well as to Falstaff in dramatic mode in 1 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of ­Windsor.64 There is a peculiar force in the adoption from Ophelia’s funeral in Hamlet of the term ‘maimed rites’ to apply to the installation ceremony for Father Ambrose in the dying days of the monastery at Melrose (10: 101.41–42). Woodcock is particularly given to proverbial utterances, both in his own character and as Howeglas in the Feast of Unrule, accounting for more than a third of the total. Two of Adam’s proverbs form part of his incessant resort to bird images associated with his profession (33.16–17, 163.22–24). Henry Warden continues to dominate the scriptural references, especially in his anathema in Chapter 4 (41.7–42.4), but it is a bravura display entirely lacking the depth of his allusions in

172 Novels The Monastery and in keeping with the sad coarsening of his characterisation in the new novel (his dispute on the Mass with Eustace diminishes both men: 7.4–11). Warden’s colleague Elias is similarly inclined, as is the Lady of Lochleven, and the calculating nihilist Dryfesdale adopts scriptural terminology in his conversation with her in Chapter 32. On the other side of the denominational divide Magdalen Graeme, and later Ambrose in Chapter 28, enlist biblical support in their respective instructions of Roland. Two of the miscellaneous literary references in The Abbot carry particular weight. At the crucial moment when Roland decides, with ‘generous devotion’, that he will defend Mary ‘come weal, come woe’ the words are taken from the chorus of Burns’s Jacobite ‘O’er the water to Charlie’ (288.26–32); and Byron’s ‘My native land, good night!’ from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage stands in solitary starkness as the motto to a final chapter otherwise devoid of literary allusion (367.18–19). In 1838 Balzac said that the plot of Kenilworth is ‘le plus grand, le plus complet, le plus extraordinaire de tous’ (the grandest, most complete, most extraordinary of all [Scott’s novels]).65 It is a closely-knit work, with densely woven images of voyaging and ascent, of dress and self-­ regarding in mirrors, of play-acting, of servant/master/mistress relationships, and of gold from alchemy and overseas adventuring (the former handled more sceptically than the latter) – all combining to characterise the brilliant but ruthless and precarious society of Elizabeth’s reign. Alongside these images is a persistent train of ornithological tropes centring on the pathetic figure of Amy Robsart, mewed up and vulnerable. The tension between the splendid pageant of Elizabethan court society and the ruthless self-seeking that disfigures it is at the centre of this novel. Almost four out of ten literary allusions are to Shakespeare, including nearly a third of the mottoes.66 His predominance is not surprising, given the novel’s emphasis on role-playing. In a beautifully judged moment he makes a personal appearance in Chapter 17 (11: 168.25–32), being brought back in time, as Amy is brought forward, to coincide in 1575, the crucial year of the Kenilworth pageant to which the characters flow.67 Raleigh’s recitation of ‘the celebrated vision of Oberon’ a few pages later and Elizabeth’s response (176.23–177.8) constitute the most conspicuous foregrounding of his work, heading up ten allusions in the chapter. At the other extreme, many of the Shakespearean allusions are simply phrasal echoes as part of Scott’s suggestion of (stagy) Elizabethan speech patterns and attitudes. In between, Wayland’s brief career in the theatre lies behind his quoting The Tempest to explain his metamorphosis from grimy and disfigured smith to ‘gay ruffling serving-man’, and neatly preparing the way for Shakespeare’s appearance in person: When challenged by Tressilian, who desired to know the cause of a metamorphosis so singular and so absolute, Wayland only answered

Novels  173 by singing a stave from a comedy, which was then new, and was supposed, among the more favourable judges, to augur some genius on the part of the author. We are happy to preserve the couplet, which ran exactly thus, – “Ban, ban, ca Caliban – Get a new master – Be a new man.” (125.32–126.6) ­ ambyses’ When in Chapter 24 Wayland addresses Goldthread ‘in King C vein’ it is likely that he is consciously adopting the Shakespearean phrases that follow, ‘Thou swearest thy Gods in vain’ and ‘most puissant mercer’ (240.19–34): the expressions are taken from 1 Henry IV, King Lear, and Julius Caesar. Shakespearean bluster surfaces again for Lambourne’s drunken approach to Amy in Chapter 33 (notably at 311.35–37). There are clusters of tavern allusions in the Bonny Black Bear scenes, playing their part in evoking a ‘merry England’ atmosphere, but with the tone darkening towards the end of the novel the focus shifts to the tragedies. As the catastrophe approaches Leicester is linked with Macbeth: with perilous ascent in the form of ‘Vaulting ambition’ in the Chapter 9 motto (209.26: Varney is included), in the two edgy epigraphs to Chapters 37 and 38 (342.2–4, 352.10–11), and in his written instruction to Varney to ‘proceed no farther’ with the murder of Amy (355.32). He plays Othello to Varney’s Iago in ­Chapter 36 (338.26–339.2), and Lear, even to himself, in Chapter 38 (357.8–9). The motto to Chapter 36 also associates him by implication with Leontes (334.15–20): this Winter’s Tale reference acquires additional force from having been preceded by three linkings of Wayland as pedlar with Autolycus, the play’s progression from dark to light being reversed (195.23–25, 202.2–4 and 35–38). The relative dearth of biblical references is largely accounted for by the absence of prominent religious figures. Forster and his daughter are partial exceptions. Forster (whom Lambourne likens to the Devil quoting Scripture: 28.31–33) cites biblical authority to justify his oppression of Amy,68 but his usage is very different when the murder has been committed: ‘Thou hast destroyed her by means of her best affections – It is a seething of the kid in the mother’s milk’ (390.16–17: Exodus and Deuteronomy). That last allusion is the second of three at the end of the novel, the first (also from Forster), ‘surely in vain is the snare set in the sight of any bird’ (389.25–26: Proverbs), setting the seal on the persistent bird images applied to Amy,69 and the last the grimly Authorial ‘The wicked man, saith Scripture, hath no bonds in his death’ (391.7–8: Psalms). Towards the end of the novel, too, Scripture is subject to hideous perversion, when Leicester addresses Varney as his ‘trusty and faithful servant’ (339.29) and urges him ‘What thou doest, do quickly’ (346.35), and as he ‘gave way to such a thirst for revenge as the pilgrim in the desart feels for the water-brooks’ (353.8–10).

174 Novels The allusions to miscellaneous texts are headed numerically by a cluster of ten Classical references from Holiday in Chapter 9: Tressilian’s initial encounter with the schoolmaster is lightly handled, with much pedantic wit in evidence, but there is an anticipatory seriousness as well as Authorial playfulness in Holiday’s ‘O, cæca mens hominum! though by the way I used that quotation before. But I would the classics could afford me any sentiment, of power to stop those who are so willing to rush upon their own destruction’ (91.20–23). The distinctive texture of Holiday’s speech is enhanced by his use of Latin proverbs and allusions to the quirky learning of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Queen Elizabeth’s discourse is distinguished by references to Ariosto and Boiardo as well as the Classics. Scott chooses to end the work not with his own words but with the final two stanzas of Mickle’s ‘Cumnor Hall’, already used for three widely spaced mottoes (392.20–27). There are numerous quotations from, and echoes of, the old dramas, many of them included in Dodsley’s anthology of The Ancient British Drama which Scott revised in 1810. Scott’s editorial labours on other Elizabethan and Jacobean texts enrich this exuberant text, and it is yet more firmly underpinned by the extravagance of the celebratory documents printed by John Nichols in his Progresses and Public Processions  … of Queen Elizabeth (1788). The exuberance, and the celebration, are not denied, but the final emphasis is on the dark and hollow heart of Elizabethan society. Gosling and Lambourne are the most prominent gnomicists in Kenilworth. Initially Lambourne broadly matches the host’s affability, but his proverbial usages soon become truculent, self-confident, or brutal. As the catastrophe approaches aphorisms disappear. The sole example from Chapter 30 to the end of the novel seems to be Lambourne’s threat to the jailor in Chapter 33: ‘So have at thee, thou old ostrich, whose only living is upon a bunch of iron keys’ (312.36–37). This leaves the way clear for the series of intensely serious echoes from the Bible, Shakespeare, and other literary sources to function with maximum impact. Scott wrote The Pirate unusually slowly, accumulating straw to make his bricks as he went (12: 395, 492). The result is ingenious and fascinating, but there are signs of strain in this obtrusively touristic and antiquarian text. The Author highlights the encyclopaedic element in the novel when describing the leaden heart provided for Minna by Norna: ‘as this simple and original remedy is peculiar to the isles of Thule, it were unpardonable not to preserve it at length, in a narrative connected with Scottish antiquities’ (267.44–268.1). Scott draws on the journal of his own tour of the northern isles in 1814, ‘since it was on shipboard that the author acquired the very moderate degree of local knowledge and information, both about people and scenery, which he has endeavoured to embody in the romance’ (25b: 136.4–6). His curious collection of pirate

Novels  175 literature is brought into play, as is his familiarity with authorities on the islands from the sixteenth-century Olaus Magnus to his own time, and with saga and other northern literature. He also seems to have derived information from his friend William Erskine, who had been Sheriff of Orkney and Zetland, though there is apparently now no way of identifying it (12: 492). Several of the Shakespeare references70 are employed consciously by Bunce, strolling player turned pirate, as part of his repertoire, and the wild and remote insular setting attracts a number of Authorial echoes of The Tempest and the storm scenes in King Lear. Bryce and Norna are both given to biblical allusion, the former as part of his ostentatious ­piety, the latter in spite of her heterodoxy until her final ‘conversion’, when she acknowledges with Isaiah, in sententious italics, that ‘The winds are in the hollow of His hand’ (389.12–13). The most striking of the Authorial biblical allusions constitutes the final words of the novel: although at the outset the Author would have preferred to avoid the application of ‘angel’ to Minna as ‘that most hackneyed symbol’ (21.25–26), at the end her humanity is ‘the only circumstance which placed her, in the words of Scripture [Psalm 8], “a little lower than the angels!”’ (391.31–32). Several of the characters interlace their predominant rhetorics with proverbs. Bunce heads the field with a frequency and vigour to match his dramatic arsenal. Halcro and Triptolemus have a proverbial, earthbound element to counterbalance their differing enthusiasms. Bryce combines canniness with his piety. Most prominent among the miscellaneous literary allusions are Halcro’s obsessive references to glorious John Dryden. These are in danger of becoming as annoying to readers as they are to the auditors in the novel, but they do provide an opportunity for an entertaining verbal joust in Chapter 36 between Halcro as champion of Dryden and Bunce as advocate of his adversary Buckingham (338.23–37). As with the White Lady in The Monastery Scott invokes Coleridge in an attempt to boost the mysterious quality of Norna (also given to verse of dubious merit), who passes like night with the Ancient Mariner (174.16); he echoes Geraldine’s ‘This hour is mine’ as ‘One hour is mine’ (177.13) and borrows ‘rare devize’ from ‘Kubla Khan’ (200.40). His enlisting of Byron’s ‘She walks in beauty, like the night’ in the initial description of Minna is more successful, enhancing with these ‘exquisite lines’ the night/day contrast between her and her sister (23.19–25). Equally effective is the motto from The Corsair at the beginning of Chapter 22 (204.32–36), to be fed immediately into Minna’s increasing disillusion with Cleveland while reinforcing on a broader scale the Byronic complexity of his character. In totally different mode, Triptolemus is characterised in part by his habitual allusion to the Classics, in tune with his name (however Shandean the way he acquired it),71 particularly Virgil and his pastoral Georgics. Indeed, The Pirate is full of Classical

176 Novels images, with Norna being referred to repeatedly as a Pythoness or Sybil and a subordinate cast of Ganymedes, Graces, Amazons, and Tritons. A further distinct literary contribution to the texture of the third volume is noted by the eewn editors: Scott had been rereading Smollett while working on the novel, and Peregrine Pickle lends savour to the nautical discourse (492). With The Fortunes of Nigel Scott returned to a location and period familiar to him, especially as a result of his editorial work on the Secret History of the Court of James the First and the Somers’ Tracts. Some 15 percent of the 460-odd literary allusions, including over thirty miscellaneous references, are found in the Introductory Epistle with the conversation between Captain Clutterbuck and the Author of Waverley: the density here is a distinctive feature of Scott’s self-consciously ‘smart’ style.72 The ensuing narrative is not often ‘smart’, but there is a predominant sense of expansive ease and Authorial enjoyment in the portrayal of London between Elizabeth and the accession of ‘the most unfortunate of British monarchs’ (13: 173.39), with the fascinating figure of James VI and I at its centre: he is introduced with a bravura paragraph enumerating his strengths and corresponding weaknesses, culminating in the classic oxymoron attributed to Sully ‘that he was the wisest fool in Christendom’ (66.40–67.24). There are fewer allusions to Shakespeare than one might expect, given the date of the action, and quite a number of them are proverbial in nature. It is likely that Scott wanted to distinguish Nigel from Kenilworth, where there are more than twice as many. In the earlier novel Shakespeare himself was very much alive, and by authorial licence his whole corpus was available for characters to refer to. Now he ‘lives after death’, as his admirer Dalgarno proclaims at the end of Chapter 12 (150.2). In this morally ambiguous scene Nigel is being introduced to the theatre with Burbage in Richard III at the Fortune. Much of the tone is celebratory, confirmed by the jovial and witty carousal after the performance. But the episode is one stage in Dalgarno’s corruption of the hero, and he uses a quotation from King John, ambiguous in itself, to encourage his companion to be open to experience, with a qualification calculated to make the adjuration easier to accept: ‘There is much … in life, which we must see, were it only to learn to shun it’ (150.1–8). Four chapters later, when the disillusioned Nigel is about to strike Dalgarno in St James’s Park with disastrous consequences, his erstwhile friend attempts to cool the situation by a double Shakespearean allusion (to 1 Henry IV and King Lear): ‘Why, Nigel, this is King Cambyses’ vein! – you have frequented the theatres too much lately … defy those foul fiends, Wrath and Misconstruction’ (178.33–37). Among the most significant of the Authorial Shakespeare references is one likening James to Richard II who ‘ambled up and down’ according to Henry IV’s contemptuous recollection

Novels  177 (114.41–115.2): at the very end of the novel the repetition of the word ‘amble’ is sufficient to reinforce this aspect of the complex presentation of King James (402.36). James has a particularly allusive style, with proverbs English, Scots, and Latin, biblical references to 1611 and the Vulgate, and diverse Classical allusions combining to make the chapters where he appears rich with literary resonance, much of it notably witty. He bows out in fine style in the last chapter with Fordoun, Claudian, Ovid, and Spenser (398.15– 399.21, 405.26). The most significant biblical allusions in the novel (no more frequent than those to Shakespeare) centre either on John Christie, giving him considerable moral stature in Chapters 28 and 36,73 or on the King. There are repeated references to James as peacemaker (110.14, 157.27), and as a second Solomon. The enormous salver with the depiction of the judgment of Solomon in Chapter 5 (68.4–70.11) is counterbalanced by the play made with Heriot’s statement that James is ‘Solomon in every thing, save in the chapter of wives and concubines’ (333.29–30), when it is slyly thrown back at him by James who has been eavesdropping (352.36–39, 370.8–11: there is a coded Authorial reference to the King’s homosexual disposition). Lord Huntinglen wrong-foots James twice with straightforward and telling invokings of Scripture, forcing him into defensive responses. In Chapter 9 the royal attempt to avoid the issue of Nigel’s restoration to his estate leads Huntinglen to cite Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings: James takes the point and authorises the necessary payment, but not before he has testily exclaimed ‘I hope ye mean not to teach me divinity?’ (115.3–22). Much later, James’s inappropriate advice to Huntinglen to prepare himself for the revelation of his son’s villainy by studying Classical and other Latin writers meets a suitable response: ‘and my own rough nature will not bear me out in any calamity, I hope I shall have grace to try a text of Scripture to boot’ (356.37–357.14). James’s rejoinder is an Authorial master touch: a concession by means of a proverb with scriptural connotations and an application to the Bible of an expression from Horace, followed by a reassertion of superiority involving his own expertise in Hebrew and a reference to his role in promoting the Authorised Version, all echoing the fulsome language of its obsequious dedication (357.15–28). Proverbs are considerably more prominent in Nigel than either Shakespearean or biblical allusions: in their different ways Richie, Malagrowther, Ursula, Hildebrod, Heriot, and James are fond of the mode. Richie is, like Andrew Fairservice in Rob Roy, a repository of wisdom derived from experience, offered to his master Nigel from time to time, and twice to himself to relieve his frustration (48.32–33, 375.15). For Malagrowther, adages are a way of expressing his cynical view of life and death (78.22–24, 169.19–21). The street-savvy Ursula typically uses aphorisms to indicate her ability to know what is going on in other people’s heads, and on one occasion Jenkin responds to her use of ‘the old

178 Novels saying, “out of sight, and out of mind”’ with ‘True – most true … spoken like an oracle, most wise Ursula’ (237.21–24). Hildebrod specialises in offering proverbial advice to Nigel with strong indications that he would be unwise not to follow it: ‘You must not think to dance in a net before old Jack Hildebrod, that has thrice your years o’er his head’ (258.11–13). Heriot may be seen as a daylight equivalent to the dark Hildebrod, using adages to rebuke lack of wisdom, or inappropriate behaviour, in those he encounters. James’s Scots and Latin aphorisms contribute significantly to his cultivation of the homely and the learned. In a deft touch, he is made to include a translation of an English proverb in his initial Latin exchange with Nigel (110.42–43). The royal cook, Linklater, should not be overlooked in this context, since though he plays a minor role he provides a distinctive combination of adages relating to his profession with a fondness for allusions to the cookery in Terence’s comedy Adelphoe. Particularly memorable is his ‘as the king quotes the cook learns’ (300.5): this is a reworking of the proverb ‘As the old cock crows the young cock learns’, Scott substituting ‘quotes’ for the manuscript ‘crows’ in proof. Peveril of the Peak is the longest of the novels, and comes with a wealth of sources and literary allusions to match. Scott had much useful material already to hand as a result of his editorial work on the Somers’ Tracts, Antony Hamilton (Count Grammont), and Dryden, and in standard histories, notably David Hume. Roger North’s Examen was immensely helpful, not least for its record of Oates’s idiosyncratic way of speaking (14: 710 (note to 422.14–16)). For the Isle of Man Scott relied largely on the accounts by George Waldron and William Sacheverell, as well as recollections of the lost papers of his brother Tom. For the Plot he asked that some of the relevant pamphlets in the Advocates Library should be borrowed for his use (he didn’t want to give anything away by borrowing them in person), but it is likely that some at least of the hundred-plus pamphlets on the subject preserved at Abbotsford were already in his possession in 1822. Biblical allusions account for more than a third of the literary references.74 Bridgenorth’s propensity to scriptural citation is associated with his Puritan enthusiasm and his increasing mental instability: it links him with his Presbyterian pastor Nehemiah Solsgrace, and with Christian/ Ganlesse in Puritan mode. There is a telling contrast in the uses of Scripture by Bridgenorth and Christian, passionate and detached respectively, during their brief meeting in Chapter 43 (441.10–36). Towards the end of the novel an intriguing twist is given to the biblical elaborations of the preacher in the conventicle (439.7–36) when, in line with the multiple uncertainties generated by the Plot, it is found doubtful that his language could definitely be held to imply the advocacy of physical violence: Neither did the violent language of the minister, supposing that to be proved, absolutely infer meditated violence. The favourite

Novels  179 parables of the preachers, and the metaphors and ornaments which they selected, were at all times of a military cast; and the taking the kingdom of heaven by storm, a strong and beautiful metaphor, when used generally, as in Scripture, was detailed in their sermons in all the technical language of the attack and defence of a fortified place. (478.26–32) On a smaller scale (so to speak) Geoffrey Hudson is given to scriptural references, centring on the defeat of Goliath and other giants, but generally aggrandising as he himself recognises (356.36–40). Overall, Christian and (to a lesser extent) Buckingham are the most allusive characters, often consciously so, a sign perhaps of their shiftiness.75 There is an unusual and effective set of references to the author Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. In the novel she is a friend of the Countess of Derby. The young Earl regards her as crazy and her work as ‘trash’ (153.31–41), and he slyly slips an expression from one of her plays (‘Cupid’s courts’) into a conversation with his mother (155.18). Three chapters later it is the Countess who adopts another of the Duchess’s phrases (187.24), and her request to be admitted to the royal presence towards the end of the novel results in some speculation as to whether it might have come from the Duchess, ‘both from the singularity of the message, and that the lady spoke with somewhat a foreign accent’ (455.12–14): the Countess is of French origin, and Margaret Cavendish had accompanied Queen Henrietta Maria when she went into exile in 1644. Scott found Peveril difficult to compose: inspiration flagged in the second volume, and its revival in the third encouraged him to risk extending the work into an unusual fourth volume. By contrast its successor Quentin Durward was constructed with great efficiency. The introduction of chapter titles alongside the normal mottoes reinforces the careful plotting, though there is some repetition of titles towards the end. This is a cool, analytical piece, presenting a sober and even grim contrast between the repeatedly emphasised youth and relative innocence of the hero, with his chivalric ideals and illusions, and the ruthless and cynical Realpolitik of Louis XI’s France. The concentration makes for a forceful novel, but Scott’s usual richness and exuberance are to a degree reined in and there are only 250 textual allusions.76 A quarter of the sparing biblical references occur in Chapter 16 as part of the Franciscan Prior’s rhetoric, and another quarter are reflections of Louis’s dubious piety. The King’s response to Cardinal Balue’s Matthean ‘Beati pacifici’ before the reception of Crevecœur as Burgundian ambassador is cunningly poised in a way typical of the man: ‘True; and your eminence knoweth that they who humble themselves shall be exalted’ (15: 102.10–12). There is no less complexity in

180 Novels his appeal to Comines to think of an alternative to offer Duke Charles rather than losing the Duke of Orleans to Isabelle: ‘thy quick brain can speedily find some substitute for this sacrifice – some ram to be offered up instead of that which is dear to me as the Patriarch’s only son was to him’ (333.14–16). The King’s brutal ruthlessness is evident in his attempt to persuade Le Balafré to ‘smite [Galeotti] under the fifth rib’ (312.12, echoing 2 Samuel), and this is more than matched by William de la Marck’s sacrilegious ‘bishop I am determined to be – a prince both secular and ecclesiastical, having power to bind and loose’ before his murder of the real bishop in the appalling Chapter 22 (239.39–40). Two of the Shakespearean allusions, both mottoes, are particularly significant. When Scott realised that his entire first chapter would be devoted to the analysis of the contrasting characters of Louis and Charles he deleted the original epigraph of his own composition with a favourite sea-voyage image applied to Quentin’s travels (412) and substituted Hamlet’s adjuration to his mother ‘Look here upon this picture, and on this, | The counterfeit presentment of two brothers’ (23.6–7). Although only the cousinship of King and Duke is specifically relevant to this motto, its firm distinction sets the narrative tone well, and the contrast between the two men dominates the whole novel. It is reinforced, for instance, by Quentin’s comment on the Constable’s position: ‘Yonder he makes his place good, with his gallant little army, holding his head as high as either King Louis or Duke Charles, and balancing between them, like the boy who stands on the midst of a plank, while two others are swinging on the opposite ends’ (49.2–6). The horrors of Chapter 22 are introduced by an ironic title (‘The Revellers’) and a motto from 2 Henry VI centring on Dick the butcher of Ashford and his ‘slaughter-house’ (236.12–18).77 This links up not only with Blok and the shambles in this chapter (242.21–23), but with a similar expression on the butcher’s first appearance three chapters earlier (213.10–13) and with the metaphorical slaughter-house invoked by Hayraddin (181.11–14) and by Louis (311.28–33). The shambles motif reinforces the unusual number of animal images in this novel, recalling Ivanhoe. At the beginning of the narrative the tone is set with an image of Louis as ‘a keeper among wild beasts, who, by superior wisdom and policy, by distribution of food, and some discipline by blows, comes finally to predominate over those, who, if unsubjected by his arts, would by main strength have torn him to pieces’ (26.1–4). Readers blessed with long memories may spot an ironic contrast when they encounter Le Glorieux’s comment on Galeotti’s being placed at the mercy of the King effectively imprisoned at Péronne: ‘we treat our kinsman as men use an old famished lion in his cage, and thrust him now and then a calf, to mumble with his old jaws’ (318.11–14: Louis is ‘an old rat in a trap’ in the jester’s next speech). William de la Marck as boar and Charles as bull are pervasive in the novel, and denigratory references to men as dogs or wolves abound: even

Novels  181 Quentin is not immune, as he and De la Marck ‘closed, like the wolf and the wolf-dog’ (395.30). Three characters are particularly fond of proverbs. Although Crawford is presented as decidedly more admirable than Le Balafré they are equally liable to come out with adages, as down-to-earth military men. Crawford’s popularity with his subordinates depends partly on his speaking their language, most conspicuously when (being far from wholly sober) he says in parting: ‘Well, lads, we must live within compass – Fair and soft goes far – slow fire makes sweet malt – to be merry and wise is a sound proverb’ (91.34–36). As Maitre Pierre, Louis is also inclined to the aphoristic, and he continues in this mode from time to time in propria persona, reflecting his conspicuous ability to communicate with all sorts and conditions and again occasionally his ruthlessness (‘There is a heaven above us’ as an instruction for the execution of Galeotti, and ‘dead men tell no tales’ anticipating that of Hayraddin: 314.37, 366.3–4). The spare efficiency of Quentin Durward in general is matched by Scott’s choice of sources. It relies predominantly on Comines’s Mémoires, with the accompanying commentaries in Petitot’s edition. Comines is an excellent basis, a first-hand account at once vigorous and balanced. Scott supplements it with a number of other French histories of various dates and Wraxall’s recent study of the Valois period. Grellmann and Hoyland are invoked as standard authorities for gypsy details, and Indagine for displays of palmistic expertise by Galeotti and Hayraddin in Chapters 13 (155.9–35) and 18, the latter entitled ‘Palmistry’ (201.23–34). The composition of Saint Ronan’s Well was carried out in an unusually leisurely way over several months, there being no urgent publication deadline. Like its predecessor it is carefully constructed, again taking advantage of chapter titles. The work combines a broadbrush semi-­ caricature picture of the set of originals at and near the fashionable spa in the Scottish Borders, at once hilarious and grotesque, with an ultimately tragic Gothic family tangle (‘perversely complicated’ is Jekyl’s ­ eddled in judgment, and Touchwood thinks that ‘everybody that has m this Saint Ronan’s business is a little off the hooks’ (16: 249.12, 284.­ 42–43)). Scott’s Authorial exuberance is deployed in the comic element, giving full rein to his ‘smart’ style, with gems such as the little imp encountered earlier in this study who ‘like Pentapolin with the naked arm … went on action with his right shoulder bare’ (287.4–5), and the summing up of Quackleben’s devotion to Saint Ronan’s Well: ‘In short, the love of Alpheus for Arethusa was a mere jest, compared to that which the Doctor entertained for his favourite fountain’ (163.32–34). The increasing predominance of the tragic is reflected in a decreasing diversity of literary references, culminating when those in the last three chapters are entirely restricted to the Bible, Shakespeare, and proverbs.

182 Novels The novel is well stocked with proverbial utterances.78 They are an essential part of Meg’s linguistic vigour, and she is virtually the only woman in the work to employ them. It is not surprising that the opinionated Touchstone and MacTurk should be fond of adages, and the same goes for the lawyers Micklewhame and Bindloose. At first sight, clusters of aphoristic usages by Mowbray and Etherington might seem less characteristic, but in Mowbray’s case they mostly occur when he is talking to Micklewhame or putting pressure on his sister, and in Etherington’s when he is explaining his conduct to Jekyl in writing (the epistolary mode tends to the allusive). In the largely secular atmosphere of this novel, a rare link with its French predecessor, biblical allusions are thin on the ground. Even the Presbyterian minister Cargill (‘who might be termed an Israelite without guile’ according to the Author: 360.19) has only one insignificant passing reference to Scripture (155.1). Meg invokes the Bible on several occasions, notably to express her disapproval of the goings-on at the Well, but once, citing Proverbs, to praise Tyrell’s attention to his horse (16.7–8): Touchstone’s use of the same text towards the end of the novel links him with Meg (351.30), as do a couple of censurings in her presence of modern developments (135.24, 136.39). Etherington’s biblical allusions in his letters to Jekyl are expectedly jocular, but Clara’s citations of the Bible at the climax of her encounter with him are utterly serious (225.16–19, 226.3–5), in contrast to her first light usage in conformity with the general custom of the place (99.17). Shakespearean allusion plays a central role in Saint Ronan’s Well. Many of the spa characters consciously adopt roles, and their propensity to acting finds an outlet in the central adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with its inbuilt amateur travesty. Most of the fourteen Shakespearean mottoes cluster round the central ‘Theatricals’ chapter, itself announced by Hamlet’s ‘The Play’s the thing’ (181.23), which could be serious but isn’t: they are generally jocular or semi-jocular, either matching the social satire or less frequently maintaining a distance from the Gothic plotting. Playful incidental allusions to Shakespeare abound in the narrative generally, but there is often a potential darkness to be sensed. When Tyrrel is surprised to see a prominent seat at the dinner-table vacant Lady Penelope jestingly calls it ‘the chair of Banquo’ (53.26), and when Clara appears she hails her with Hamlet’s ‘Angels and ministers of grace!’ ‘with her very best tragic start’ (64.41–42): in the catastrophe the motif of spectre at the feast is to be grimly worked out. Clara herself flirts with the role of Ophelia teasingly (69.4–6, anticipated by the Author at 67.17), but a few pages later her strangely transmuted whisper, recalling Mrs Siddons, of Lady Macbeth’s ‘Are you a man?’ is entirely grave (75.9–16: there is a further echo of the exchange between Beatrice and Benedict in Act 4 Scene 1 of Much Ado about Nothing), as are her allusions to As You Like It and Othello soon afterwards (85.1,

Novels  183 86.5). In the pages leading up to her conversation with Etherington Clara’s Shakespearean references are again teasing, but they now seem tinged with hysterical tension (208.10–13, 215.35, 216.3). Several of the mottoes reinforce dominant patterns of imagery in the novel. ‘The Album of Saint Ronan’s’, of Scott’s own composing, observes that ‘Bees have their Queen, and stag herds have their leader’ (24.3–7). The spa is depicted as a menagerie,79 but the predominant animal imagery relates neither to lions, bears, or monkeys, nor to bees and stags, but to domestic dogs and horses. The dogs are mostly not vicious, as they had been in Quentin Durward, but join with the horses to indicate the wide range of instincts, from co-operative to quarrelsome, underlying the social scene. The mottoes to Chapters 27, 28, and 29 include references to war or the threat of war.80 In its proportion of images derived from military conflict Saint Ronan’s Well is second only to The Bride of Lammermoor. Most of them emphasise that Saint Ronan’s is a society far from at ease with itself, with aggression in almost every area from personal prestige to gambling to the machinations of the Gothic plot. The mottoes to Chapters 2 and 4, introducing Tyrrel to the reader and the spa, are both Classical – the first with a jocular rendering into colloquial English (12.3–6), ‘Co’ in the second being the birthplace of the artist Apelles (32.3) – and a number of the abundant Classical images in the novel link the characters with archetypal counterparts in ancient times. Since Redgauntlet is set in 1765, just six years before Scott’s birth, as with its immediate predecessor and The Antiquary historical sources were not necessary. It is also entirely lacking in chapter mottoes, taking its cue from the epistolary first volume. That volume accounts for half of the biblical, Shakespearean, and miscellaneous literary allusions, deployed by Darsie and Alan in their ‘smart’ exchanges.81 Many of the references are exercises in bonding cleverness, and (Darsie suggests) part of a distinctive way of storytelling: ‘I continue to scribble at length, though the subject many seem somewhat deficient in interest. Let the grace of the narrative, therefore, and the concern we take in each other’s matters, make amends for its tenuity’. He immediately follows this up with allusions to Shakespeare, the Bible, Weber’s Tales of the East, and a quotation from The English Minstrelsy edited by Scott in 1810 (17: 102.7–23). Alan readily returns the balls Darsie sends in his direction, and enjoys depicting his friend in romance terms with references to Valentine and Orson, The Faerie Queene, Amadis of Gaul, and above all Don Quixote.82 Both friends make frequent use of Classical images from texts they (and their creator) had studied at the High School in Edinburgh. But all is not playfulness and elaboration. The depth of the young men’s friendship is evident in Alan’s quoting ‘I am sick at heart’ from Hamlet and Darsie’s evoking of David and Jonathan (72.8, 113.27–28). Their respective narratives in the second volume have

184 Novels much less in the way of allusion: the most notable, and the most serious, instance is the double echo of Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Darsie recalling his narrow escape from death in the Solway (159.12–19). There is a telling contrast between the highly ornamented opening volume and the concluding three chapters of the novel which are almost devoid of intertextual references, reinforcing the tone of subdued gravity in one of the most impressive endings in the series. Very different propensities to biblical allusion are evident in Josiah Geddes and his daughter on the one hand (Letter 7; Chapters 3 and 10) and the hypocritical Trumbull on the other (Chapters 12 and 13). In the short letter written to Darsie by Alan’s father (Letter 9) the three references are all scriptural (he also recommends two anti-Quaker tracts). Fairford senior continues to cite the Bible, but he is also fond of proverbs, the most striking usage being an oblique expression of (short-lived) pride in his son’s performance in court: ‘Many a hand of gratulation was thrust out to his grasp, trembling as it was with anxiety, and finally with delight; his voice faltering, as he replied, “Ay, ay – I kend Alan was the lad to make a spoon or spoil a horn”’ (134.19–22). Aphorisms contribute substantially to the characterisation of Wandering Willie, Peter Peebles, Provost Crosbie, Nixon, and Ewart. The last of these pours out proverbial, biblical, Shakespearean, and Classical allusions in his sad degeneracy, never entirely sober: his warning endorsement of Pete Maxwell’s letter to Redgauntlet is a nicely judged reference to the Iliad (‘Cave ne literas Bellerophontis adferres’: 279.25–26). Scott found The Betrothed difficult to write: at one stage he even resorted to destroying part of his manuscript, and indeed the work was in danger of being abandoned altogether (the story is told in the first section of the eewn ‘Essay on the Text’). A very limited set of authorities is deployed efficiently enough for the generalised late twelfth-century setting in the English-Welsh border region (18a: 364). Scott’s failure to engage fully in the task of composition perhaps explains why the specific literary allusions in The Betrothed are noteworthy neither for their frequency nor in general for their originality or force.83 Gillian, Genvil, and Raoul are typical of characters given to proverbial utterances, and the clerics Aldrovan and Baldwin dominate scripturally. It is symptomatic of a tendency to the routine that when Baldwin, urging De Lacy to continue with his Crusading intentions, cites 2 Kings where ‘the dial went back at the prayer of the good King Hezekiah’ (159.2–3), the reader’s recollection of the unforgettable usage of the same text to justify advancing the hour of Morton’s murder in The Tale of Old Mortality can only result in a sense of diminution of power here. On the other hand, Aldrovand’s invitation, in biblical terms, to Eveline to join him in praying for deliverance from ‘the jaws of the devouring wolf’ (the Welsh: 43.12–15) initiates an effective chain of such vulpine images in the novel.

Novels  185 The Shakespearean echoes in speeches are mostly simple matters of phraseology or of sentiment as in all the medieval novels, the most memorable being the disguised De Lacy’s feigned reference to himself when testing Damian with its echo of Macbeth: ‘his life is now on the dregs, and, I grieve to speak it, these dregs are foul and bitter’ (274.41–42). Much of the spirit in this novel is to be found in the imagery rather than the allusions, though allusions sometimes feed into its dominant tropes. The standard images of storm and threat from the sea applied to military force are energised by repeated linkings of the Welsh attackers with the danger of literal flooding from which the Flemings are ­refugees.84 So there is a particular appropriateness when The Tempest is invoked (signalled by the word ‘tempest’) to convey the comparative feebleness of the Norman response to the greatly superior Welsh army: ‘cheerily as they rung, the trumpets, in comparison of the shout which they answered, sounded like the whistle of the stout mariner amid the howling of the tempest’ (38.19–21). James Macpherson’s terminology is also enlisted as the forces advance ‘their ridgy battalions, like the waves of an approaching tide’ (67.37). Just before this allusion the Welsh army are heard like ‘Bees alarm’d, and arming in their hives’, echoing the Moorish forces in Dryden’s The Spanish Friar (67.22). They form part of a series of aggressive bees, wasps, hornets, and ants in the passage and elsewhere in the work,85 and they join forces with several unpleasant stabbings: a Welsh soldier wounding Raymond’s noble warhorse ‘in the belly with his long knife’ (40.32–33); the heron’s bill thrust into the earth and its legs broken (200.15–17); and Vidal as possibly ‘an executioner standing with his knife suspended over his victim, and deferring his blow until he should discover where it would be most sensibly felt’ (239.38–40), and later burying his dagger in the back of Randal de Lacy’s neck, ‘just where the spine, which was severed by the stroke, serves to convey to the trunk of the human body the mysterious influences of the brain’ (263.8–11). The scene where Eveline is captured, introduced by a hawking motto from Thomas Randolph (193.9–11), is the anchor point for an array of images involving birds, and especially birds of prey.86 Conventional angelic imagery is given a fascinating twist by its application to Damian as well as Eveline, suggesting a fundamental affinity between them.87 Four of the mottoes have a special force. The death-seeking Raymond is shadowed by York from 1 Henry VI at the beginning of Chapter 3 (26.13–15). Eveline’s intriguing mixture of quietist piety and spirited authority is emphasised by the epigraph to Chapter 8 from William Stewart Rose’s ‘Edward the Martyr’ (64.6–12: in the original, it may be recalled, Lady Bankes defends Corfe Castle in the Royalist cause before its demolition) and that to Chapter 22 from Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets (187.5–11). Another aspect of Eveline, her proneness to superstition, is suggested by the motto to Chapter 15, going beyond the

186 Novels immediate departure in the chapter by recalling a supernatural summons in Tickell’s ‘Lucy and Colin’ (121.19–23). Although the writing of The Talisman was not without interruption, it seems that Scott became deeply involved in its composition in the spring of 1825 and the result, as observed earlier, is a tightly knit narrative, unified by the three scenes at the Diamond of the Desert (constantly underpinned by references to actual and metaphorical jewels) and ­Saladin’s triple identity. The novel draws on a wide range of texts in addition to the five specific sources for particular episodes described in detail in the eewn Historical Note (18b: 365–70). A wealth of detail is drawn from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Weber’s Tales of the East, d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale, Henry’s History of Great Britain, and Mills’s History of the Crusades, as well as from translations of Oriental texts and a variety of imaginative treatments of the East in contemporaneous literature. The tally of some thirty straightforward proverbial allusions is not high,88 but there is a strong gnomic feel to Saladin’s utterances in particular; so much so that Kenneth the Author comments, citing the book of Proverbs: ‘The overloaded appetite loathes even the honey-comb, and it is scarce a wonder that the knight, mortified and harassed with misfortunes and abasement, became something impatient of hearing his misery made, at every turn, the ground of proverbs and apothegms, however just and apposite’ (202.40–203.1). As usual, several of the proverbial maxims have not been traced elsewhere and may well be Scott’s own (for example, ‘list to a Frank, and hear a fable’ at 11.3 and ‘abuse not the steed which hath borne thee from the battle’ at 161.21). A number of these adages are ascribed to specific oriental sources: Mansour at 17.5–9, Lokman at 217.4–6 and 257.5–8, and the Qu’ran at 202.8–10 and 268.16–17. Sometimes it seems that Scott has translated Western maxims into oriental terms, as with ‘the Eastern proverb, that the sick chamber of the patient is the kingdom of the physician’ (72.17–19) or ‘the tattered robe makes not always the dervise’ (256.5–6). Twice, he adopts gnomic expressions recorded by Gibbon (215.18–19, 252.43– 253.2). One of Saladin’s utterances combines the Bible and the Qu’ran (134.6–9), and another recalls the Bible and Richardson’s Clarissa (256.42–257.1). Exceptionally, Scott uses two of the genuine oriental proverbs in d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale: ‘what sayeth the poet – it is better that a man should be servant of a kind master, than the slave of his own wild passions’ (201.9–11). Shakespearean allusions are also scarce in The Talisman. Most of them, as in the companion novel, are matters of phrases contributing to the rhetoric. Three of the six echoes of Othello are of this sort,89 but the other three, appearing in close proximity to each other, invite the reader to apply Othello’s irrationality to Richard as he insists on Kenneth’s

Novels  187 execution.90 Contrariwise, two neighbouring references to Much Ado about Nothing deftly emphasise the irresponsible levity of the Queen and her ladies (182.39–40, 183.3). The most striking of the biblical allusions are those employed in the three opening chapters to build up the sense of the desert as a forbidding environment haunted by diabolical forces. These are notably reinforced by the opening motto, adapted from Paradise Regained (3.6–8) and backed up a few pages later by lines from Warton’s ode ‘The Crusade’ with a necromantic focus (50.13–17). Engaddi, the desert hermit, has his own sets of scriptural allusions, with a strong tendency to the apocalyptic, in Chapters 4, 18, and 28.91 Woodstock is unusually long for a three-volume novel, and unusually obsessional. Very little actually happens in the first two volumes of the novel, and the whole work bears a distinct resemblance to the labyrinthine structure of Woodstock Lodge, and to the repetitive accounts of the tricks played on the Parliamentary Commissioners that make up Scott’s chief sources. The characters spend much of their time debating the niceties of their allegiances, convictions, and possible courses of action: witness Everard in Chapter 6. In the following chapter Cromwell’s manner of speaking is notably periphrastic and obfuscatory. Sir Henry Lee’s naïve royalist allegiance finds one of its main outlets in his compulsion to quote Shakespeare, the favourite author of the executed king. Largely as a result of his contribution the novel has the greatest density of Shakespearean allusion in the series. The Author suggests that Lee quotes Shakespeare ‘as many others do … from a sort of habit and respect to him, as a favourite of his unfortunate master, without having either much real taste for his works, or great skill in applying the passages which he retained on his memory’ (19: 54.42–55.2); when he reads Shakespeare aloud he does so ‘with more zeal than taste’ (257.2). It is true that many of Lee’s quotations are phrases or sentiments taken out of context. When he is fortified by ‘There’s such divinity doth hedge a king, | That treason dares not peep at what it would’ (244.10–11), he doesn’t recall that in Hamlet it is Claudius who utters the lines. It is also true that he can be obtuse, most amusingly so when he fails to spot the irony of the disguised Charles’s praise of his ‘noble horsemanship’ (274.9). Equally amusing is his threat to read Richard II: unlike his late father, the fugitive King does not care for the outdated Shakespeare (250.7–251.41), and in any case as C. M. Jackson-Houlston observes ‘Richard II was hardly a tactful choice’.92 But there is nothing peculiar to Lee in detaching quotations and allusions from their original context, and he is much more often witty than obtuse. The wit can involve a degree of self-mockery, as when he casts himself in the role of Polonius, saying to Everard ‘Sir, I dare turn my daughter loose to you’ (139.18). To Josceline’s report that the Devil made the Commissioners vacate the Lodge he responds, echoing King Lear again: ‘Then … is the Prince

188 Novels of Darkness a gentleman, as old Will Shakspeare says. He never interferes with those of his own cast’ (193.33–34). When Albert and Alice paint very different pictures of Charles he returns to Hamlet: ‘Look thou upon this picture, and on this! – Here is our young friend shall judge’ (245.30–31). The reference is knowing, but he is of course unaware that the ‘young friend’ is the disguised King. Often, Lee is simply using Shakespeare to express his feelings at particular moments, as Alice well appreciates: ‘Our little jars are ever well nigh ended when Shakspeare comes in play’ (24.9–10: 1 Henry VI). Hence his exclamation on returning to the Lodge vacated by the Commissioners ‘Here we are again in the old frank’, immediately followed by ‘my age is like a lusty winter, as old Will says – frostly but kindly’ (196.13–25: 2 Henry IV and As You Like It). A pleasant feature of the novel is that other characters quoting Shakespeare refer, joining Alice, to Lee’s obsession with the author. Albert says to Rochecliffe ‘The pitcher goes oft to the well – the proverb, as my father would say, is somewhat musty’ (237.25–27: Hamlet), and Charles is at his most attractive in his reference to Julius Caesar when taking leave of Everard: ‘“If better times come, why we will meet again, and I hope to our mutual satisfaction. If not, as your future father-inlaw would say,” (a benevolent smile came over his face, and accorded not unsuitably with his glistening eyes) – “If not, this parting was well made”’ (315.38–42). Woodstock is also dense in biblical references, yielding pride of place in this respect only to The Tale of Old Mortality. The variety is impressive: Holdforth’s straightforward clusters (especially in Chapter 16), Harrison’s crazed applications in Chapters 13 and 15, Cromwell’s largely adopted sententious piety, Wildrake’s parody of Puritan rhetoric in Chapter 5, and the contrast between Tomkins’s sermon in the first chapter and his perversion of Scripture in his attempt to seduce Phoebe in Chapter 28. Some of the novel’s proverbial utterances bring out the sententious side of Sir Henry, and his keeper Joliffe is also gnomically active. The Preface does not have the plethora of miscellaneous literary allusions characteristic of the various epistles and so forth prefacing other novels, but something of their ‘smart’ detachment can be discerned in the opening three pages of the narrative, with the motto from Hudibras followed by references to John Ferriar, Milton, and Chaucer as well as two light Shakespearean allusions. This encourages the reader to maintain a degree of distance from the narrative that follows, with a sceptical attitude towards enthusiasm, pantomime trickery, or regal turpitude. Classical allusions (notably in Chapter 9) indicate the Presbyterian Holdforth’s level of education, and references to the old drama make a significant contribution to Wildrake’s man-of-the-world stance. With the last five works in the series Scott adopts a much less allusive narrative style, anticipated only in Quentin Durward, The Betrothed,

Novels  189 and The Talisman. This is disguised a little in Chronicles of the Canongate by the modestly allusive style of the ‘smartish preface’ signed by Scott himself,93 and of the more extensive introductory and connecting passages by Chrystal Croftangry (citing his ancestor with several biblical references, among seventy in the whole volume).94 The actual narratives of ‘The Highland Widow’, ‘The Two Drovers’, and ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’ are largely unelaborated, with the final four chapters of the last work providing only three citations. The distinction between ‘smartish’ and relatively unadorned material is pointed up by Janet’s incomprehension of the former, in part at least, as opposed to her emotional response to ‘The Highland Widow’ (20: 54.23–55.2, 67.40–68.2). For most readers it is likely that the two short stories will benefit from this stylistic starkness: it enables the sequence of seven proverbs in the second chapter of ‘The Two Drovers’ (Chapter 13) to stand out in remorseless succession. The novella, though, gives the impression of being a decidedly under-nourished performance, which ‘might have been, and ought to have been, a great deal better’ (287.9–10). The oriental scenes recover somewhat: Scott was able to draw on many Indian connections among family and neighbours and material supplied on request by Col. James Ferguson who had a quarter of a century’s experience with the East India Company, as well as a limited number of printed sources. The most intriguing allusive material in the Chronicles occurs in the second chapter where Croftangry quotes from a family history compiled by his great-grandfather and comments on its use of biblical and Classical allusion: ‘The passages from Scripture and the classics, rather profusely than happily introduced, and written in a half-text character to mark their importance, illustrate that peculiar sort of pedantry which always considers the argument as gained, if secured by a quotation’ (25.43–26.3). The same criticism might well be directed at the virtuoso scriptural displays in earlier novels, and indeed some readers might feel inclined to apply it to the ‘smartish’ style of Croftangry himself and his creator. More locally, the censure is relevant to the matching set of biblical allusions by the minister Tyrie in ‘The Highland Widow’ (118.24–31). In contrast Tyrie’s professional usages are flanked by Elspeth’s heart-felt echoes of Ruth and Psalm 146 (118.22–23, 119.19–20), reminding us that the Author had noted (in Wordsworthian mode) her propensity to use ‘the emphatic language of Scripture, which in that idiom does not greatly differ from her own’ (84.22–24). Elspeth’s first utterance, heard by Mrs Baliol, though actually from Home’s Douglas, is in scriptural idiom: ‘My beautiful – my brave!’ (76.23). For many readers, The Fair Maid of Perth will come as a relief after the imperfectly controlled narrative of ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’. Scott is on familiar ground, with an array of medieval and modern histories to draw on, though he collapses ‘ten years’ history into a period of about

190 Novels six weeks’ (21: 465). For Perthian details he supplements the general Scottish material with James Cant’s edition of Henry Adamson’s long seventeenth-century poem The Muses Threnodie. Although Scott had some difficulty in bringing the strands of the narrative together it is an impressively measured work. The Author is particularly careful to hold the reader’s hand at a number of the chapter openings, as for example with Chapters 14 and 15: ‘A former chapter opened in the royal confessional; we are now to introduce our readers to a situation somewhat similar, though the scene and persons were very different’ (145.27–29); ‘We have shown the secrets of the confessional; those of the sick chamber are not hidden from us’ (157.26–27). The precisely chiselled style of that second sentence is typical of this novel at its best. A matching overall control is evident notably in the obsessive reference to hands throughout the work, culminating in a phrase firmly established as proverbial by its use in Rob Roy and the current novel: ‘I fought for my own hand’, says Henry Gow (377.30). Henry and his eventual father-in-law Simon Glover are the characters most fond of proverbs, though there are only forty in this lean narrative.95 A similar number of Shakespearean references are mostly glancing echoes, but Wilmon C. Brewer plausibly suggests that Henry in 2 Henry VI has influenced Scott’s portrayal of the weak King Robert (hence the motto to Chapter 21: 222.4–6), and that the death of Rothsay has overtones of Gloucester’s murder, the arrangement of Rothsay’s body ‘so as to resemble a timely parted corpse’ echoing Warwick’s expression ‘timely-parted ghost’ prompted by the Duke’s remains.96 Philip Hobsbaum observes that Ramorny’s role, ‘underpinned by a tissue of Shakespearian allusions – is that of a sinister Falstaff, a gaunt one, following a decadent prince’ who is ‘an unreformable Hal’.97 Most notable among references to authors other than Shakespeare are two to Ben Jonson’s Volpone which help to sketch in Dwining’s miserly character. His delight in gazing on his gold in Chapter 22 clearly echoes Volpone’s opening soliloquy (238.7–29), and ten chapters later his phrase ‘the altar of mine idol’ is sufficient to reinforce the association on the brink of his suicide (348.32–33). The Bible plays a significant role in this novel. The difference between Anselm and Clement is highlighted by the former’s tendency to use Scripture to assert ecclesiastical authority, beginning with the classic reference to the Matthean Keys of Peter (92.9–11), as opposed to Clement’s willingness to learn from the Psalmist’s ‘babes and sucklings’ whom God employs to rebuke ‘those who would seem wise in their generation’ in Luke’s phrase (152.11–12). Crucially, Catherine’s moral authority is emphasised by her pacific allusions to Hebrews and Isaiah in her attempts to influence the bellicose Gow in the second chapter (28.35–36, 29.19–29), and by her unconscious repetition, in warning Rothsay against Ramorny, of Clement’s reference to the fire of inspiration in Psalm 90 burning within him (291.23–25, 332.36–37). We have

Novels  191 already noted the particularly chilling use of Job by Rothsay (192.3–5): the Narrator recalls this scene in another of his chiselled sentences towards the end of the novel, ‘The Prince of Scotland was not to be murdered, as Ramorny had expressed himself on another occasion, – he was only to cease to exist’ (334.23–25). The opening chapters of Anne of Geierstein could hardly be described as chiselled: an overpowering Alpine setting is forcefully conveyed in sentences that always threaten to get out of control but never quite do. The narrative that follows is immensely ambitious in scope and variety. Scott carried out an unusual amount of research specifically for this work (22: 503–09), and its rich diversity shows that his labours paid dividends. Comines’ Mémoires are central, as they had been in Quentin Durward, but much is added to them, giving a very different feel to the work. Prominent among the results of Scott’s investigations are: the geological component of the opening Alpine description, taken from Louis ­Simond’s Switzerland; the detailed and atmospheric Secret ­Tribunal drawing on five written authorities; the Provençal scenes owing much to J. R. Pappon’s Histoire générale de Provence; the Mont Saint Victoire setting inspired by James Skene’s sketches; and the events at La Ferette and the concluding battles drawing on the recently published thirteen-volume Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne by Barante. In common with the other novels at the end of the series the style is largely unadorned by literary references: it is at its most impressively terse in Donnerhugel’s Narrative, in remarkable contrast to the opening chapters.98 The mottoes are straightforward, changing the mood from chapter to chapter effectively. When Margaret and later René of Anjou appear the motto and quotation from 3 Henry VI align Scott’s depiction of the period with Shakespeare’s (262.34–40, 325.11–13). A series of biblical allusions makes Arnold Biederman stand out morally, like Catherine in the preceding novel. To express his loyalty to Anne he echoes Ruth in his confrontation with Schreckenwald early in the work (54.2–3), and later his fidelity to the elder Philipson issues in allusions to Genesis and Luke (166.11–16). His son, echoing Hebrews, talks of his father’s desire to reach the Burgundian court ‘in peace with all men’ (102.4–6), immediately contrasting with Donnerhugel’s mocking citation of the fifth commandment (102.14–15: it is perhaps no accident that he echoes Exodus again at 104.32–34). Arthur himself is linked with David’s encounter with Goliath in 1 Samuel in Chapters 6 and 36 (60.1, 393.9–10): the general paucity of allusion in this novel means that the pleasing symmetry across the exceptional range of the intervening action has more chance of being noticed. A similar moral pointing using biblical allusion can be discerned in Count Robert of Paris.99 This hallucinatory narrative offers a challenge

192 Novels to the reader with its unstable characterisation and endless equivocation and obfuscation heightened by the often barely controlled sentence structure. There is a rare stability in Hereward’s self-conscious ‘blunt faith and honesty’ (23a: 212.34–35), evident in his eloquent observation to the shifty Achilles: When we walk in a labyrinth, we must assume and announce that we have a steady and forward purpose, which is one mode at least of keeping a straight path. The people of this country have so many ways of saying the same thing, that one can hardly know at last what is the real meaning. We English, on the other hand, can only express ourselves in one set of words, but it is one out of which all the ingenuity of the world could not extract a double meaning. (79.4–11) The Bible gives Hereward a focus for his distrust of ‘the doctrine which causeth to err’ and false prophets as instructed by his grandsire Kenelm (94.34–38), his rejection of the wiles of Satan (206.8–9), and his confidence that God alone knows the heart (235.6). Hereward’s biblical references (to Proverbs, the gospels, and Psalms) are complemented by those of Ursel, expressing the mystical quietism discovered in his dungeon.100 Both Hereward and Ursel stand in marked contrast to Agelastes whose fondness for citing Scripture is bereft of moral responsibility.101 It may also be noted that several Classical allusions among the ninety miscellaneous references strongly reinforce the Byzantine setting, Homer being particularly prominent. Count Robert was comparatively lightly researched. It draws extensively on Gibbon’s classic Decline and Fall, supplemented chiefly by Cousin’s French translation of Anna Comnena’s history of her father Alexis, and for details of the layout of Constantinople by James Dallaway’s Constantinople Ancient and Modern. Twice, Scott taps memorably into one-off sources, Procopius (suggested by Gibbon) for Agelastes’ memorable account of the remote island which Hereward calls home (70.19–71.10), and Mandeville for his more extended story of Zulichium (117.20–121.33). But he is unusually dependent on his own imaginative resources for a narrative at least as weird as those from the mouth of Agelastes. As a counterweight to Count Robert, the most exotic of the novels, Scott reverted to the intensely local Border setting of The Black Dwarf for his last published fiction, Castle Dangerous. Uniquely, he paid a special visit to refresh his boyhood recollection of the area. The highly particularised contours of Douglasdale in a dreich March, effectively highlighted by the motto to Chapter 3 from The Merchant of Venice (23b: 24.19–22), are the setting for a story resonant of Barbour and Border ballads ­(foregrounded as mottoes to Chapters 7 and 20: 55.16–30,

Novels  193 172.2–10). The linguistic indirection of the Byzantine court is paralleled by the perverse verbal duelling of de Valence and Walton, the latter remarking ‘I am sorry … that we two have of late grown so extremely courteous that it is difficult for us to understand each other’ (69.14–16). As with its two immediate predecessors, several of the twenty biblical references serve to highlight morally positive figures.102 At the outset Bertram remembers with gratitude, echoing Matthew: ‘when was it that I hungered or thirsted, and the black stock of Berkely did not relieve my wants?’ and the disguised Lady of Berkely replies with a repeated ‘I would have it so … I would have it so’ (8.20–24). In Chapter 5 he responds to de Valence’s confidence in the enhanced fortifications of the castle with the Psalmist’s ‘Nisi Dominus custodiet’ (42.10). Bertram’s attempts to bridge the divide between English and Scots are paralleled by the Bishop’s peacemaking exhortations to the dying Turnbull in the penultimate chapter with four biblical references.103 As with Count Robert Scott relies very much on two basic sources, in this case Barbour’s Brus and David Hume of Godscroft’s History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus. Apart from these narratives he is again dependent largely on his own imaginative resources, with some short-term input from the Scotichronicon for the spectre at the wedding feast (30.7–28), from his own early work on Thomas of Erceldoune for Bertram’s account of his search for the manuscript (37.12–40.33), and from The Whole Prophecies published in 1615 for the ‘dubious and imperfect vaticinations’ read from the Douglas manuscript (156.5–157.21). Castle Dangerous is the last of the Waverley Novels, but it was not quite the end. In an ultimately vain quest for improved health Scott travelled to Malta on a warship provided by the government in the autumn of 1831. After three weeks on the island he moved on to Naples. During four months in that city he revelled in the riches of the Royal Library in the Palazzo degli Studi, arranging for a manuscript of Sir Bevis of Hampton to be copied for his collection. He also wrote one more novel, The Siege of Malta. The work was not published in full until the present century, together with a half-finished Calabrian novella entitled Bizarro.104 The manuscript of the Siege is very faulty, requiring some vigorous editing to produce a readable text, and the initial fiction gives way to a reworking of the Abbé de Vertot’s account of the Great Siege of 1565, when the Knights of St John repelled an assault by Moslem forces with great loss. The fictitious opening, showing the effect on a number of characters in Spain of the call to the Commander Don Manuel to send forces to defend Malta, is followed by an account of the heroic but ultimately doomed attempt to hold Fort St Elmo, and a final section where, after appalling slaughter and destruction, the attacking forces are finally compelled to withdraw from the island. The dependency almost entirely on a single source, a favourite from Scott’s youth, takes to an extreme

194 Novels the comparative thinness of historical sources in his later novels. A parallel development results in an extreme paucity of literary allusions, but two of them stand out in the largely unadorned narrative with considerable power. Don Manuel and the Grand Master exchange conflicting views of Cervantes (50–52). The Grand Master La Valette accuses the author of Don Quixote of undermining the traditional values of chivalric discipline, prompting the Commander to say in his defence: As to what you say of Cervantes having undermined the principles of chivalry in Don Quixote, he only points out the extravagancies to which they may be carried, and the infinite enjoyment which readers discover in the freaks of a madman, who takes everything for serious that he finds among the absurdities of romances of chivalry, which every sane person must regard as the most exaggerated extravagance. (51.23–28) A few pages later Scott has the Knights meet in a building modelled on the uniquely impressive conventual church of St John (now the co-­ cathedral), which was not built until twenty years after the Siege and which he described haltingly in his journal as ‘by the far most manificend place I ever saw in my life’.105 The cathedral and its oratory are paved with the elaborate marble tombstones of the departed Knights: The portraits of the fathers of the Order were delineated upon their memorials, dressed in no other garments than those which should accompany them to the grave. Their swords are gliding from their extenuated forms, their armour falls to earth as that for which they have no longer any use, and their faces are turned upwards with the expressions of those whose heavenly recompense is about to be paid them. It is a fine illustration of the lines of Coleridge: The good knights are dust, And their bright swords are rust; Their souls are with the saints we trust. (56.1–11) The Siege of Malta embodies some of Scott’s deepest concerns at the end of his life: heroic struggle against overwhelming odds, the instability of character, and the insecurity and anger of old age. In his final allusions he sets those concerns in perspective by invoking two authors who had long haunted his imagination. The lines from ‘The Knight’s Tomb’ resonate with their use in Ivanhoe and Castle Dangerous to sum up the evanescence of human grandeur and the hope of transcendence. And as the titanic struggle of the Siege is getting under way the Commander’s contribution to the debate can be seen as a defence, in the face of that evanescence and in anticipation of that transcendence, not only of Cervantes, but of sanity and ‘infinite enjoyment’.

Novels  195

Notes 1 Coleman O. Parsons, ‘The Highland Feasts of Fergus MacIvor and Lord Lovat’, Modern Language Notes, 49 (1934), 287–90 (290). 2 The resulting density in Waverley is 1.3 allusions per page: some sixty of the allusions are biblical, 100 Shakespearean, 270 to other writers, and sixty proverbial. Since the figures are indicative they are rounded: there will often be a slight difference between the sum of the allusions in each category and the total figure given. 3 See Ruth Beckett, ‘Another Shakespearean Influence in Waverley’, Scott Newsletter, 9 (Winter 1986), 2–7. 4 See 1: 140.10–11, 141.38, 280.34–35, 292.17–18. 5 See 1: 23.42–24.1, 60.11–12, 61.7–9, 127.34–35. 6 See 2: 16.22–17.21, 20.8–24, 520–22. 7 See 25a: 110.7–113.40, 121.16–30, 125.14–23. 8 The total number of literary allusions in Guy Mannering is some 340 (a density of 0.9 per page): forty biblical, ninety Shakespearean, 130 to other authors, and seventy proverbial. 9 Jane Millgate, ‘The Structure of Guy Mannering’, in Influence, 109–18 (115). 10 For the material derived from Gordon see the explanatory notes on 3: 461–63. 11 25a: 150 (note to 3: 171.33). For the material derived from Scot see the explanatory notes on 3: 494–95. 12 The total number of literary allusions in The Antiquary is some 500 (a density of 1.4 per page): seventy biblical, 100 Shakespearean, 260 to other authors, and eighty proverbial. 13 See 4a: 201, and 79.30, 92.27–28, 86.12, 86.13. 14 The total number of literary allusions in The Black Dwarf is some 100 (a density of 0.8 per page): fifteen biblical, twenty Shakespearean, forty to other authors, and twenty-five proverbial. 15 See 4a: 26.30–32, 52.41–53.39, 67.13–17. 16 See e.g. the explanatory notes to 4a: 14.19–20, 52.11, 53.20, 54.40–55.1, 63.24, 70.15, 76.16–17. 17 See Angus Calder’s ‘General Note on Sources of Localities and Characters’ in his edition of the novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 518–19. 18 4b: 388 (note 18). The request is dated 26 August 1816; Scott began to write the novel early the next month. 19 See e.g. the explanatory notes to 4b: 126.8–9, 175.15, 244.33–37, 275.29–30. 20 See the explanatory notes to 4b: 11.22, 13.9–10, 267.22, 328.35. 21 See e.g. the explanatory notes to 4b: 121.24, 143.41, 147.38–39, 218.12. 22 See the explanatory note to 4b: 16.14. 23 The resulting density in The Tale of Old Mortality is 1.8 allusions per page: some 430 of the allusions are biblical, fifty Shakespearean, 100 to other writers, and seventy proverbial. 24 See Robert Hay Carnie, ‘Scottish Presbyterian Eloquence and Old Mortality’, Scottish Literary Journal 3:2 (December 1976), 51–61. Carnie argues that Scott presents a balanced view of the religious scene in the Covenanting period. A rather less favourable view, taking on board some of the criticism levelled at the Covenanting rhetoric in the novel by David Craig, is taken by D. W. Jefferson: Walter Scott: An Introductory Essay (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2002), 41–56. 25 See the explanatory notes to 5: 12.39–41, 14.29, 15.19–20 and 35.

196 Novels 26 See many of the explanatory notes on 5: 500–11. 27 See the explanatory notes to 5: 248.31–33, 249.42, 271.2, 274.17–18, 306.27–43. 28 See the explanatory notes to 5: 209.13–38, 210.16–19, 212.18–20. 29 The total number of literary allusions in Rob Roy is some 500 (a density of 1.5 per page): ninety biblical, eighty Shakespearean, 170 to other authors, and 170 proverbial. 30 J. Derrick McClure, ‘Linguistic Characterisation in Rob Roy’, in Influence, 129–39 (131–33). 31 Ibid., 136. 32 Anachronistic allusions are not restricted to mottoes: at the end of Chapter 6 Frank refers to ‘Marmontel’s late novel’ (Bélisaire, published in 1767: 52.35). 33 See 25a: 310.35–311.41, 314.23–26. 34 The total number of literary allusions in The Heart of Mid-Lothian is over 700 (a density of 1.5 per page): 300 biblical, seventy Shakespearean, 200 to other authors, and 140 proverbial. 35 At the end of the novel Butler also has a reference to Gallio when commenting on Effie’s conversion to Roman Catholicism: ‘any religion, however imperfect … was better than cold scepticism, or the hurrying din of dissipation, which fills the ear of worldlings, until they care for none of these things’ (6: 468.22–25). 36 For other condemnations of the ‘carnal’ see 6: 83.13, 102.13, 112.4 and 13, 356.38, 387.23. 37 ‘… And an Intertextual Heart: Rewriting Origins in The Heart of Mid-­ Lothian’, in Carnival, 216–31 (219–20): the ellipsis is original. Inglis also suggests that Smollett’s Humphry Clinker is a pervasive presence in this novel. 38 6: 72.18–24, 84.13–17, 285.20–22, 306.16–18, 357.18–22. For a full and useful discussion of the Crabbe mottoes see Catherine Jones, Literary Memory: Scott’s Waverley Novels and the Psychology of Narrative (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 60–63, 71. 39 J. H. Alexander, ‘“Das Goldene Schloss”: A Likely Source for The Bride of Lammermoor’, Scott Newsletter, 34 (Summer 1999), 2–6 (6). 40 The resulting density in The Bride of Lammermoor is 1.2 allusions per page: some sixty of the allusions are biblical, fifty Shakespearean, 110 to other writers, and ninety proverbial. 41 For the Marquis and his agent in proverbial mode see 7a: 72.33, 123.19–21, 161.26–27, 203.27, 224.22–23. 42 See 7a: 191.43, 257.5–6, 263.18 and 34–35. 43 See 7a: 57.41–42, 58.42–43, 73.34. 44 For Bidewell see 7a: 243.3–11, 245.40–246.9, 248.20–250.9, 251.19–29. 45 Frank McCombie plausibly suggests that Scott is drawing on Charles Kemble’s interpretation of Hamlet as a sensitive contemplative: ‘Scott, Hamlet, and The Bride of Lammermoor’, Essays in Criticism, 25 (1975), 419–36. 46 See 7a: 17.21–29, 35.28–36.1, 142.41–42, 238.13. 47 The resulting density in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose is 0.8 allusions per page: some thirty of the allusions are biblical, a similar number Shakespearean, fifty to other writers, and thirty proverbial. 48 7b: 183.1–4. For the earlier uncanny references see 12.9, 28.24, 138.33–35. 49 Two further tournament mottoes are taken from Dryden’s paraphrase of this work (8: 65.17–28, 76.2–9). 50 See 8: 30.38, 31.9–10, 282.27, 307.41–42, 352.43.

Novels  197 51 The resulting density in Ivanhoe is 1.1 allusions per page: some 220 of the allusions are biblical, seventy Shakespearean, 120 to other writers, and fifty proverbial. 52 Graham Tulloch, ‘Ivanhoe and Bibles’, in Carnival, 309–19 (316). 53 See 8: 305.31–36, 311.17–19, 320.35–36, 321.13–17, and the explanatory notes to 322–23 on 565–66. 54 For a useful discussion of the mottoes in particular see Silvia Mergenthal, ‘The Shadow of Shylock: Scott’s Ivanhoe and Edgeworth’s Harrington’, in Carnival, 320–31 (326–30). Many readers will also spot the echo of ‘A sentence!’ in Chapter 33, where the outlaws get Isaac and Aymer to say what ransom each can be expected to afford (285.25–286.40), and two other echoes will resonate with those very familiar with the play (63.32–33, 308.39). Judith Lewin suggests that the references to the play encourage the reader to discern a liberation from Shakespearean prototypes: ‘Jewish Heritage and Secular Inheritance in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 19:1 (Winter 2006), 27–33 (28). 55 The total number of literary allusions in The Monastery is over 320 (a density of 0.9 per page): 100 biblical, thirty Shakespearean, 130 to other authors, and sixty proverbial. 56 For Shafton see 9: 137.1–2, 172.8–10, 180.40–41. For Christie see 9: 98.10–11, 99.40, 282.24, 284.14–15. 57 See 9: 59.14–15 and 29–30, 61.1–2 and 8. 58 See 9: 136.25–28, 145.19–20 and 34–45, 203.41, 247.39–42; 188.10–36, 270.42–271.5. See also Graham Tulloch, ‘Sir Walter Scott’s Excursion into Euphuism’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 78 (1977), 65–76 (71–75). 59 Patricia Harkin, ‘The Fop, the Fairy, and the Genres of Scott’s Monastery’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 19 (1984), 177–93. 60 Jane Millgate, ‘From Deferral to Avoidance: The Problem of The Monastery’, in Carnival, 265–79 (267). 61 A. N. Wilson, The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 96. 62 See 9: 18.32–36, 86.32–36, 223.4. 63 The total number of literary allusions in The Abbot is some 400 (a density of 1.1 per page): 130 biblical, eighty Shakespearean, 110 to other authors, and eighty proverbial. 64 See 10: 105.4–6, 110.25–26, 113.3–4, 250.11–13 and 42. 65 Honoré de Balzac, Lettres à l’Étrangère, 4 vols (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1899), 1.454 (To Madame Hanska, 20–22 January 1838). Translated in Hayden, 373. 66 The total number of literary allusions in Kenilworth is some 420 (a density of 1.1 per page): seventy biblical, 160 Shakespearean, 110 to other authors, and eighty proverbial. 67 Fiona Robertson points out that when, later in Chapter 17, Sussex refers to Shakespeare as ‘a stout man at quarter-staff, and single falchion, as I am told, though a halting fellow’ (11: 173.3–4) Scott is taking on board a tradition that Shakespeare was lame, as he himself was, and taking comfort from his triumphing over the disability: ‘Scott’s Halting Fellow: The Body of Shakespeare in the Waverley Novels’, Scott Newsletter, 33 (Winter 1998), 2–13. 68 See 11: 52.7–12, 221.32–37, 381.21–22. 69 See J. H. Alexander, ‘The Major Images in Kenilworth’, Scottish Literary Journal, 17:2 (November 1990), 27–35.

198 Novels 70 The total number of literary allusions in The Pirate is some 390 (a density of one per page): sixty biblical, ninety Shakespearean, 150 to other authors, and eighty proverbial. 71 Jana Davis notes that ‘Scott’s echoes of Tristram Shandy help characterize Yellowley as an intruder in the Shetland of 1700; a humour character linked with a mid-eighteenth-century English novel, he is ‘an alien tonally, geographically, and chronologically’: ‘Scott’s The Pirate’, Explicator, 45:3 (Spring 1987), 20–22 (22). 72 The resulting density in The Fortunes of Nigel is 1.1 allusions per page: some seventy of the allusions are biblical, a similar number Shakespearean, 180 to other writers, and 140 proverbial. 73 See 13: 318.12–13, 320.13, 394.34–395.9. 74 The total number of literary allusions in Peveril of the Peak is some 600 (a density of 1.2 per page): 230 biblical, 100 Shakespearean, 180 to other authors, and ninety proverbial. 75 For the role of proverbial sayings in the intertextual construction of Buckingham’s character see A. D. Cousins and Daniella E. Singer, ‘Scott’s “Character” of Buckingham in Peveril of the Peak, XXVIII: Dialogism, Speech/Writing, and Law’, Neophilologus, 81 (1997), 649–57 (651). 76 The resulting density in Quentin Durward is 0.6 allusions per page: some fifty of the allusions are biblical, a similar number Shakespearean, ninety to other writers, and sixty proverbial. 77 In manuscript Scott directed that the motto to Chapter 22 should be moved there from the previous chapter, for which he provided a motto from Henry V in proof. 78 The total number of literary allusions in Saint Ronan’s Well is some 400 (a density of 1.1 per page): sixty biblical, 100 Shakespearean, 150 to other authors, and 100 proverbial. 79 See 16: 49.20, 67.29–68.22, 372.37–42. 80 See 16: 249.6–8, 254.20–21, 267.3–6. 81 The total number of literary allusions in Redgauntlet is some 430 (a density of 1.1 per page): 100 biblical, eighty Shakespearean, 150 to other authors, and 100 proverbial. 82 See 17: 13.34–35, 35.8–9, 65.6–7, 72.1. For Don Quixote see especially 12.39–13.1, 13.31, 71.38–72.3, 76.19–20. 83 The total number of literary allusions in The Betrothed is some 200 (a density of 0.7 per page): fifty biblical, a similar number Shakespearean, seventy to other authors, and thirty proverbial. 84 See 18a: 32.36–37, 67.26–27, 75.17–19, 203.23–24. 85 See 18a: 67.18–19, 68.29–33, 144.9, 181.39, 227.12–15. 86 See especially 18a: 109.20–22, 197.4–5, 254.39–40. 87 See 18a: 79.2, 93.3, 129.37–39, 136.12–14, 145.1, 168.17–22, 171.4, 226.40–227.2, 254.30. 88 The total number of literary allusions in The Talisman is some 240 (a density of 0.9 per page): 110 biblical, forty Shakespearean, sixty to other authors, and thirty proverbial. 89 See 18b: 81.4, 126.14, 193.14. 90 See 18b: 144.17–20, 145.25, 145.26. 91 See 18b: 39–50, 159–71, 271.1–24. 92 C. M. Jackson-Houlston, ‘“Scoundrel Minstrels”: Some Allusions to Song in Two Scott Novels’, in Carnival, 97–109 (105). Nicola J. Watson notes that Richard II functions as an admonitory text in the novel: ‘Kemble, Scott, and the Mantle of the Bard’, in The Appropriation of Shakespeare, ed. Jean I. Marsden (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 73–92.

Novels  199 93 Such a preface was originally intended to have appeared in the collected Tales and Romances of the Author of Waverley (20: 303). 94 The total number of literary allusions in Chronicles of the Canongate is some 280 (a density of one per page): seventy biblical, fifty Shakespearean, 120 to other authors, and forty proverbial. 95 The total number of literary allusions in The Fair Maid of Perth is some 220 (a density of 0.6 per page): eighty biblical, fifty Shakespearean, a similar number to other authors, and forty proverbial. 96 21: 347.4–5: see 2 Henry VI, 3.2.161. Brewer’s comments can be found in his Shakespeare’s Influence on Sir Walter Scott (Boston, MA: Cornhill, 1925), 369–74. Brewer’s suggestion may be supported by a further echo of 2 Henry VI at 245.21–22, and by the ominous motto to Chapter 7, ‘This quarrel may draw blood another day’ from 1 Henry VI (63.2–3). 97 Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Scott’s “Apoplectic” Novels’, in Influence, 149–56 (151). 98 The total number of literary allusions in Anne of Geierstein is some 160 (a density of 0.4 per page): fifty biblical, forty Shakespearean, a similar number to other authors, and thirty proverbial. 99 The total number of literary allusions in Count Robert of Paris is some 220 (a density of 0.6 per page): seventy biblical, forty Shakespearean, ninety to other authors, and twenty proverbial. 100 See 23a: 276.33–38, 292.26–29, 299.26–30, 301.5–11. 101 See 23a: 118.13–14, 119.16, 128.24–37, 129.3–4. 102 The total number of literary allusions in Castle Dangerous is some 110 (a density of 0.6 per page): twenty biblical, a similar number Shakespearean, sixty to other authors, and ten proverbial. 103 See 23b: 168.14–41, 169.32–34, 170.8–10. 104 ‘The Siege of Malta’ and ‘Bizarro’, ed. J. H. Alexander, Judy King, and Graham Tulloch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). 105 Journal, 686 (29 November 1831).

8 Envoi

In the early years of the present century there have been welcome signs of a willingness to recognise the importance of the playful element in Scott’s fiction, to approach the Waverley Novels as game. In 2004 Jerome J. McGann wrote of the introductory chapter of The Bride of Lammermoor: ‘This kind of writing – so replete in Scott – installs neither a truth of fact nor a truth of fiction but the truth of the game of art. It is more than make-believe, it is conscious make-believe. Scott wants to draw his audience into his fictional word by assuming and playing upon his reader’s distance and disbelief’.1 The following year, Harry E. Shaw announced that he now wished to prioritise Scott’s ‘use of history as a source of pure, irresponsible, imaginative energy and delight’. 2 It is hoped that those who have read this study (with whatever exercise of ‘the laudable practice of skipping’) will be in a position to approach, or return to, Scott’s fiction with a keen sense of the stylistic and intertextual High Jinks we are invited to join. In the narrative poems that first brought him widespread acclaim Scott’s Authorial voice, initially honed as he edited the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, is heard most consistently in the voluminous notes, enabling them to act as an ironic and sophisticated commentary on the verse narrative, and at the same time to reinforce the moral concern of that narrative with its emphasis on human fallibility and the destructiveness of arrogant and rigid mindsets. In the novels the Authorial voice is brought into the main narrative, with first-edition notes restricted to occasional brief appearances at the bottom of the page. A reader alert to the pervasive textural playfulness will be able to approach, or return to, the predominant theoretical and thematic discussion, that ‘unending conversation’, with an understanding of the crucial role of the ludic in the novels’ intellectual and moral import. Scott’s fiction is ‘irresponsible’ in that it does not claim to be serious history. It can be a way into serious history: the reviewer of Peveril of the Peak for the Gentleman’s Magazine thought Scott had ‘done more towards creating a taste for the perusal of English history, than any writer whatever since the age of Shakspeare’.3 But Scott recognises that the relationship between history and fiction, as between any form of

Envoi  201 reality and fiction, is oblique. His tolerant, humorous Authorial tone foregrounds this obliquity, as do his often transparent anachronisms. The Waverley Novels spring from a receptive frame of mind that seeks out and respects cultures geographically and temporally remote from Author and reader. Closer to home, it declines to confine itself to the world of the literati. One of the consequences of this receptive tolerance is a refusal to treat fiction with excessive quasi-puritanical seriousness. The Author does not trivialise, but he has a responsibility to advocate and practise a degree of irresponsibility. In The Tale of Old Mortality the surname of the hero, Henry Morton, is an abbreviated anagram of ‘Moderation’. That novel, more than any other in the series probably, constitutes a passionate advocacy of the moderate, while recognising the cost often involved in its pursuit, and the problems of articulating it.4 The passion issues not in moral rodomontade, but in Morton’s measured argument and in an Authorial discourse shot through with irony. Author and hero are both committed to a resolute rejection of dehumanising fanaticisms and abstractions. Andrew Lincoln has observed that ‘the ironical gestures of Scott’s fiction, the playful qualifications, the self-deflating authorial personae, could always be read simply as aspects of disarming good humour, rather than as signs of a critical reservation (Alexander Welsh, for example, claimed that irony was “foreign to Scott’s mind”)’. 5 In fact, as we have seen from many examples, irony and good humour are both omnipresent in Scott’s ludic discourse. It is true that during most of the narrative Morton shows no sign of playfulness. There is precious little space for it in his troubled career. He fights for moderation in the thick of the action with the utmost seriousness. The Author promotes the same cause with irony and textural sportiveness. The ‘Conclusion’ of the novel suggests that when the action is over Morton may have recovered the ability for play we glimpsed briefly when he first appeared, participating in ‘the game of the popinjay’, incurring the disapproval of ‘the elder and more rigid puritans, whose curiosity had so far overcome their bigotry as to bring them to the play-ground’ (4b: 20.14–15, 33–35), and thereafter engaging in his first attempt at moderating ‘on a merry occasion’ in the Howff (31.1). Scott’s endings are as varied, as challenging, and as enjoyable as anything explored in this study. The ‘Conclusion’ to The Tale of Old Mortality, among the best of them, follows immediately on the death of young Lord Evandale, and the Author has to be reminded by Miss Martha Buskbody of his responsibility to his readers to let them ‘see a glimpse of sunshine in the last chapter’. In response he summarily indicates to her that ‘the parties in whom you have had the goodness to be interested, did live long and happily, and begot sons and daughters’. Miss Buskbody responds primly: ‘“It is unnecessary, sir,” she said, with a slight nod of reprimand, “to be particular concerning their matrimonial comforts. – But what is

202 Envoi your objection to let us have, in a general way, a glimpse of their future felicity?”’ (350.9–18). A page later, all the Author vouchsafes to add is: ‘The marriage of Morton and Miss Bellenden was delayed for several months, as both went into deep mourning on account of Lord Evandale’s death. They were then wedded’ (351.24–26). The tone of the ‘Conclusion’ suggests that after their period of mourning, the survivors are freed to move on into a world where there is once more room and permission for responsible playfulness, although past horrors can never be erased from the memory. Sibyl Jacobson has suggested a parallel between Henry Morton and the short-lived Peter Pattieson, recorder and editor of the eponymous craftsman’s Covenanting anecdotes in the opening chapter, the novel’s ‘artistic frame’: In a sense the accommodation Henry Morton reaches is analogous to the frame’s focus on the artistic process, the artifact resulting from the relationship between the sedentary artist observing life and the historical fact of that life as it exists before his eyes. The ordering process – ‘compiling,’ ‘recording,’ ‘editing’ – finds a complement in Morton’s assertion of a middleway order against the chaos of extremes. Some might say this adjustment or accommodation is compromise. In a sense, it is, but Morton’s compromise is a choice of life over death.6 The point is well made (and it is supported by another latent play on Morton’s surname, this time with ‘m/Mortality’). One should add to it, though, the constructive role demanded of the reader. Each of us has to work out an appropriate relationship between the frame (both opening and concluding) and the narrative, as well as between the Author’s poised voice and the displays of frenetic speech. In the novels, fundamentalist and rigid death cults abound – selfish, intolerant, notably humourless, inhumane in themselves and destructive of humanity and its abundant artefacts. The cults are allowed to put their case, to have their say, as part of the polyphonic texture, because it is important to understand why they are as they are, and to appreciate the partial validity of their rejection of licentious hedonism (in The Tale of Old Mortality manifesting itself in Sergeant Bothwell). But they love death; the Author, Morton, and it is to be hoped the reader, love life. In Scott’s fullest discussion, found in the ‘General Preface’ to the Magnum edition, of his reasons (eleven have been identified) for maintaining a somewhat theoretical anonymity until 1827, two in particular stand out. He wanted to avoid acquiring ‘the habits of self-importance’ he had observed when an author’s self-conceit was fuelled by ‘the partiality of friends, or adulation of flatters’. And, simply, quoting Shylock, ‘such was my humour’.7 For Scott anonymity was an important factor in

Envoi  203 the construction of a liberating and civilising writerly playfulness. The Authorial voice of the Waverley Novels – modest, intelligent, witty, playful, teasing, profoundly questioning, resolutely moderate, persistently ironic but never cynical – offers a recreative middle space between the rigid and the indulgent for readers to make their own as they revel in a liberating and enlarging experience of ‘infinite enjoyment’. His work complete, the Author can slip away, as he does at the end of The Tale of Old Mortality (4b: 352.36–40), ‘ere the Demon of Criticism’ comes up with ‘any more queries. In like manner, gentle Reader, returning you my thanks for the patience which has conducted you thus far, I take the liberty to withdraw myself from you for the present’.

Notes 1 Jerome J. McGann, ‘Walter Scott’s Romantic Postmodernity’, in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 113–29 (117–18). 2 Harry E. Shaw, ‘Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott’s Redgauntlet)?’, Rethinking History, 9 (2005), 173–95 (190). 3 Gentleman’s Magazine, 93:1 (January 1823), 48–50 (49). 4 For an eloquent and penetrating analysis of some of the problems encountered by Morton as moderate see Peter D. Garside, ‘Old Mortality’s Silent Minority’, Scottish Literary Journal, 7:1 (May 1980), 127–44, reprinted in Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels, ed. Harry E. Shaw (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 149–64. 5 Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 219. Alexander Welsh’s mistaken suggestion can be found in his The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 11. 6 Sibyl Jacobson, ‘The Narrative Framing of History: A Discussion of Old Mortality’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 1 (1971), 179–92 (184). 7 25a: 15.20–20.26. For a useful enumeration and discussion of eleven reasons suggested by Scott for his practice of anonymity see Seamus Cooney, ‘Scott’s Anonymity – Its Motives and Consequences’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 10 (1973), 207–19.

This page intentionally left blank

Index of Passages Discussed

Chapter numbers are followed by the eewn page and line number or numbers, and the relevant page in the present study. Square brackets enclose chapter numbers in Magnum-based texts where they differ from those in the eewn. Asterisked chapters have no direct equivalent in the Magnum. The following abbreviations are used: ‘HW’ for ‘The Highland Widow’, ‘TD’ for ‘The Two Drovers’, and ‘SD’ for ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’. 1  Waverley general 1, 7, 17, 24, 41, 44, 45, 53n55, 54n63, 57, 83, 89, 126, 139, 152n2, 153n3, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 157–58, 159, 161 title-page 109 1 3.8–6.12 53n45 3.21–24 147 4.3–5 32 6.5–12 2–3 2 7.34 40 9.2–4 39 12.3–4 32 3 12.36–13.1 148 14.19 7 15.17–18 141 15.30–31 7 4 16.31–32 7 17.21–23 137 19.33–34 132 19.38 32 5 20.3–12 146 20.31 36 20.37–21.3 65 23.32–35 136 23.42–24.1 195n5 24.13–16 35 24.46 158 25.40–42 53n45 26.4 65 26.12–31 53n45 26.18–23 144

26.27–28 30 6 29.23 77 31.25–26 40 7 33.31–32 158 34.28 76 8 34–38 31 35.31–36.12 40 36.16 36 9 40.15–26 144–45 40.17–19 37 40.33–39 47–48 42.6 128 10 43–47 31 43.27 36 45.17–41 58 45.27–28 144 45.42–43 47 46.17–18 81 11 48.12–14 47 48.21 40 50.43–51.1 65 52.43–53.2 71 53.27–31 128 12 56.15–27 26 57.29–31 71 58.10–11 70

206  Index of Passages Discussed 58.35–36 36 13 60.11–12 195n5 60.26 71 61.7–9 195n5 64.16–18 73 65.18–21 10–11 14 67.33–35 11 69.39–41 139 18 94.12–95.11 30 95.12–14 53n45 96.36–37 36 97.4–10 36 19 97.13–24 80 97.20–24 31 101.39–40 155n33 20 103.20–104.16 157 21 106.39–107.3 130 22 112.13–117.12 43 115.17–116.20 57 24 121.8–122.17 32–33 122.1–2 65 122.14–17 29 123.37 36 127.34–35 81, 195n5 25 133.3–4 32 133.36–134.5 30 135.23–27 158 26 136.38–137.3 130 27 140.10–11 136, 195n4 141.38 135, 154n17, 195n4 28 149.7–11 40 29 151–58 157 30 158.35–36 83 160.16–19 69 160.18–19 158 160.30–37 158 162.16–19 158 31 164–71 31 36 185–89 31, 157 186.30 125 38 195.39–42 56 39 200.26 66 202.13–23 36 203.7–8 60 203.24–30 37 40 208.17 158 41 209.30–31 147 212.41–213.1 71 42 218.28–35 76 43 219.24–28 144 221.40–222.10 48 222.22–23 70 225.1–4 78, 144

46 235.22–26 142 237.9–18 42 237.26–28 71 237.40 76 47 239.30 69 240.35 60 241.36–37 157 48 246.5–6 71 50 252.24–25 82n16 254.8–255.12 30 51 256–61 31 256.11–26 30 54 270.24 83 271.26–37 145 56 279.8–13 71 279.17–20 130 279.37–38 69 279.41–43 81 57 280.34 149 280.34–35 136, 195n4 281.4–6 126–27 281.9 130 284.23–24 147 58 285.9 83, 145 59 292.17–18 195n4 60 299.41–42 149 62 305–12 157 309.32–42 158 310.3 62 63 315.25–28 151 317.4–6 11, 145 64 320.3–4 71 320.34 150 65 322–29 157 323.34–36 144 323.35–36 138 66 330.2–3 83, 95 330.12–13 79 67 335–40 157 335.2–3 83, 95 335.22 153n6 68 340.29–30 83, 95 69 346.6–8 83, 95 348.41–42 128–29 348.42–349.3 158 350.17–18 157 70 351–55 157 351.27 83 71 355.7–8 83 359.3 138 362.25–28 40 72 362.30 83 362.30–365.15 57 364.4–7 158 364.5 60

Index of Passages Discussed  207 2  Guy Mannering general 14, 17, 41, 42–43, 44, 49, 54n63, 83, 94, 126, 133, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 158–60 title-page 109–10 1 3.7–13 149–50 2 9.1 114n9 9.31–32 33 9.41–42 65–66 10.34 39 3 16.22–17.21 195n6 18.26–28 22–23 18.45 110 4 20.8–24 195n6 21.18–22 159 5 29.2–4 67 6 30.23–27 127–28 30.32 76, 160 31.18–28 26 33.1–14 7–8 33.8 82n16 7 35.8–37.10 29 36.1–3 65 8 41.27–31 58 43.5 76 43.11–12 43 44.27–30 130–31 9 45.2–8 160 46.23–28 59 48.31–33 160 51.1–2 117 10 53.2–8, 26–38 95 53.26–55.33 29 11 59.16–26 89 66.27 65 12 67.2–11 93 70.17–19 154n22 13 73.10–18 98–99 74.4–17 30 14 78.2–17 88 78.24–28 55–56 15 86.18–20 143 16 87–91 93 87.2–6 97–98 88.36–37 97–98 89.22–25 90–91 90.32–35 62 17 91.9–12 85 18 95.25–26 90 96.9–12 69 96.17–20 33 101.27 62 19 102.15–19 30 105.16–17 68

20 106.2–3 95 108.12–13 62 109.27–110.2 8 21 115.27 62 22 117.7–11 92–93, 114n11 117.27–28 11 118.7–8 79 23 123.2–3 114n11 123.37 159 24 128.21–25 85 25 132.6–11 85 26 136.9–11 85 138.31–32 114n9 141.1–4 66 27 142.7–9 96–97 145.29 159 146.34–147.2 131 28 148.2–10 95 148.19–21 66 29 155.32–39 127 30 166.9–17 8 33 178.23–31 33 34 188.12–16 13 193.27–28 159 35 193.41–194.1 40 36 200.2–4 155n32 200.15–20 58 203.25 129 203.43 155n32 204.37 155n32 37 209.19 155n32 211.18–23 143 38 217.23 97 219.1 97 220.2–4 97 220.24 43 220.25–36 29 224.15–16 63–64 39 226.8–37 35 231.13, 39–43 155n32 232.9–24 30 234.30–31 67 40 237.10 73 41 243.24–30 88 44 263.7–9 66 46 274–81 159 277.7–8 32 279.13–14 147

208  Index of Passages Discussed 47 281.31–35 90 286.24 90 49 296.24–26 140, 160 298.28–29 159 50 307.33–34 117 310.37–38 155n32 51 312.2–6 100 315.39–41 72 317.32–34 32

53 324.30–38 106 327.24 67 55 335.17–21 95, 159 338.23–24 114n11 56 343.8–10 64 57 348.27–29 90 58 352.29–30 95 353.20–28 8

3  The Antiquary general 14, 17, 25, 44, 45, 54n63, 57, 85, 94, 116, 126, 139, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 158–61 title-page 110 1 7.38–40 63 9.35–10.2 10, 160 10.5–8 63 2 12.2–10 107 14.14 56 17.2–3 107 17.11–12 82n9 3 21.29–35 19n5 23.15–18 73 23.22–35 147 23.22–26.5 19n5 26.21–22 82n9 4 27.22–23 40 30.9–13 82n9 31.34–41 58 33.23–25 82n9 5 34.13 82n16 37.5–6 69–70 37.37 56 39.8–9 77 6 42.17–24 82n9 42.22–24 132 46.6–8 155n40 47.29–33 147 50.23 65 52.13–21 149 7 53.25 101 58.21–29 142 8 61.22–26 127 62.42 127 64.9–10 127 66.22–23 77 9 68.12 63 71.29–35 19n5 10 75.12–22 150 75.15–22 72, 160 76.39–42 160 77.5 56 11 84.25–26 30

84.42 80 85.6 129 85.23–27 160 86.7–8 79 88.6–11 76 14 103.31–37 82n9 106.5–6 82n9 107.16 82n9 15 110.1 40 113.5–7 129 114–17 150 114.26–29 56 117.19–20 76 16 119.5–9 88, 136 120.9–12 88 124.17–25 160 17 127.9–11 32 129.38–130.8 69 131.29–132.14 118 18 136.34–39 100 137.33–146.17 19 141.12 121 144.17–18 69 19 146.32–33 63 147.7–8 82n10 149.7–9 125 150.4–8 29 150.42 76 151.35–36 135, 136 151.43–152.1 135, 136 154.6–7 160 20 160.13–16 150 161.39–162.4 160–61 21 164.2–8 99 167.6–9 151 171.33 195n11 22 181.34–40 128 23 194.9–13 67 24 196.27–28 71–72

Index of Passages Discussed  209 25 201.29–34 99 27 217.24–25 101 28 226.6–7 127 29 230.2–6 90 232.9–12 118 234.33–34 64 234.34 136 30 237.5–14 90 242.25–246.43 41 243.1–2 78 245.3–42 82n10 245.30–36 65 246.8–11 147 31 247.27–29 43 250.32–33 117 32 253.19–24 87–88 253.22 101

256.2–9 43 34 267.4–9 90 35 283.17–284.3 30 284.4–5 33 36 284.9–17 99 37 297.15 82n10 39 304.23–25 70 307.7–9 63 310.16–311.11 41 40 310.19–22 76 318.4–6 63 318.9–12 33 42 331.15–17 160 43 339.28–29 63 340.7 63 45 354.10–11 76–77

4a  The Black Dwarf general 17, 54n63, 84, 146, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 161 title-page 110 Introduction 6.22–26 161 1 11.7–14.12 13 13.34–37 68 2 14.19–20 195n16 3 26.30–32 195n15 4 27.23–26 95 33.22–28 161 35.1–20 161 6 42.9–12 135, 161 44.23–45.7 152n1 7 45.15–20 92 52.11 195n16 52.41–53.39 195n15 53.20 195n16 8 54.2–6 106 54.14–15 72 54.40–55.1 195n16 9 63.24 195n16

10 67.13–17 195n15 69.41–70.5 161 70.15 195n16 11 74.4–10 102, 151 76.16–17 195n16 79.30 195n13 12 85.6–10 161 13 85.26–31 135, 161 86.12 195n13 86.13 195n13 88.17–20 161 92.27–28 195n13 15 100.30–33 91 16 107.27–31 95 110.5 161 111.20 102 17 112.24–25 95 18 118.24–26 95

4b  The Tale of Old Mortality general 17, 54n63, 84, 116, 118, 139, 146, 152n2, 153n4, 155n37, 155n39, 161–63, 201–03 title-page 110 1 5.6–9 87 5.27–6.1 141 11.22 195n20 13.4–6 30 13.9–10 195n20 2 16.14 195n22

20.14–15, 201 33–35 3 23.5–9 56 4 31.1 201 6 41.5–6 133 42.21–22 133

210  Index of Passages Discussed 43.22–25 120 45.17–18 136 47.2–3 162 8 61.40 132–33 10 81.32–36 148–49 12 99.34–36 148 105.38–39 125 13 109.21–22 127 111.1–3 51n9 14 121.22–27 120 121.24 195n21 126.8–9 195n19 127.17–19 119 15 127.30–36 94 16 135.10–12 94 143.41 195n21 17 144.20 99 144.38–145.5 118–19 146.10–11 99 147.38–39 195n21 18 151.2–4 94 154.5–10 118 21 170.15–21 162 175.15 195n19 22 181.37–38 120 23 184.19–20 99 25 206.38–40 118

27 214.10–11 91 218.12 195n21 218.38–40 162 28 221.15–17 90 30 236.2–4 91 244.33–37 195n19 32 255.2–6 91 33 261.30–31 124 264.19 82n21 264.30–265.9 162 34 267.22 195n20 269.28–29 140 35 272.40–41 140 273.37 140 275.29–30 195n19 36 278.39–42 140 280.21–22 140 281.5 153n8 37 286.2–3 89 287.8–11 162 39 315.4 129 316.15–16 138 42 328.1–2 124 328.35 195n20 44 350.9–18 202 351.24–26 202 352.36–40 203

5  Rob Roy general 45, 54n63, 139, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 163–64, 190 title-page 110 164 Advertisement 3.26–29 1 7.4 135 2 12.39–41 195n25 14.29 195n25 15.19–20, 35 195n25 16–17 164 20.21–30 145 3 22.29–33 164 22.34–36 112 24.25–28 69 4 28.8–12 87 28.36 23 29.33 163 31.31–32 143 32.10–11, 39 163 32.43 87 33.1 163 6 44.7–10 143 50.28 164 52.35 196 8 63.14–19 66–67

69.26–27 135 69.27 154n16 10 81.29–82.10 8 12 98.16–18 164 103.3–6 164 13 106.1–10 164 15 129.36–37 131 16 130–32 145 130.2–5 96, 164 19 153.12–16 164 157.12–13 124 20 158.21–25 164 21 165.21–24 164 22 173.12–22 98, 164 174.41 98 23 183.2–10 82n12 185.29–186.16 164 25 201.26–203.36 163 26 209.13–38 196n28 209.31–32 13 210.16–19 196n28

Index of Passages Discussed  211 212.18–20 196n28 27 220.20–28 163 223.25–28, 39–40 163 30 248.31–33 196n27 249.42 196n27 31 262.36 82n21 266.24–25 125–26 32 268.7–14 125–26 271.2 196n27 274.17–18 196n27

33 285.11 117 34 287.29–298.38 163 35 299.2–7 89 299.2–305.5 163 306.27–43 196n27 308.2 164 308.39–309.11 89 37 316.13 76 39 334.24–29 149 340.17–19 164

6  The Heart of Mid-Lothian general 14, 40–41, 44, 54n63, 116, 128, 137, 139, 146, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 164–66 title-page 110 1 14.42–15.45 15 18.7–11 125 2 21.2–10 148 3 26.20–27.33 89 5 41.10–12 109 6 48.9 35 48.23–34 35 7 56.17–19 78 56.38 79 59.22 140 62.3–4 122 64.17–21 100 8 65.24–25 100 72.4 165 9 72.18–24 90, 196n38 74.19–30 165 74.21–22 165 74.26–27 165 75.33–34 165 78.22–23 124 80.4–6 129 81.4–5 165 83.13 196n36 10 84.13–17 196n38 87.20–30 66 88.22–89.6 165 90.36–37 165 90.40–41 165 94.15 153n8 11 95.5–9 91 95.10–14 32 95.31–32 35 12 102.7–8 76 102.13 196n36 103.2–3 165 103.31 165

104.40 165 112.4, 13 196n36 112.25 165 14 131.37–39 57 132.17–18 118 15 136.5–17 165 136.36–39 151 136.38–39 166 139.35 78 16 143.20–28 144 149.7 66 18 161.7–9 94 163.2–3 140–41 170.39–41 154n19 19 [18ctd] 171.4–5 25 173.9 153n6 173.35 165 173.39–41 118 174.12 165 20 [19] 179.33–37 98, 108 21 [20] 184–91 166 184.5–9 94 186.5–23 124 186.41 121 187.3–7 166 187.32 123 189.28–30 140 22 [21] 191.16–20 90 193.12–13 35 23 [22] 197.2–7 94 198.4 165 203.5 118 24 [23] 204.33–207.3 29 207.21 78 210.9–11 53n54

212  Index of Passages Discussed 212.19 82n20 214.10–12 53n54 25 [24] 220.39–221.37 53n54 26 [25] 222.8–11 94 226.8 154n16 28 [27] 239.4 72 240.24–25 150 246.41 165 29 [28] 248–56 165 30 [29] 256.5–6 94 31 [30] 266.12–14 107 267.1–8 166 272.42–273.5 150 273.41–274.16 165–66 276.18–20 166 32 [31] 277.6–8 151–52, 166 282.41–283.1 165 33 [32] 285.20–22 94, 196n38 287.11 125, 165 291.24–26 32 34 [33] 298.8–11 165 298.20–26 34 299.31–34 131 35 [34] 306.16–18 94, 196n38 36 [35] 320.12, 24 155n38 321.5–7 18 324.15–16 140 38 [37] 338.43–339.2 41

40 [39] 351.35–39 125 355.7 121–22 355.26 165 356.38 196n36 41 [40] 357.18–22 196n38 42 [41] 373.28–29 65 43 [42] 375.18–20 43 44 [43] 380.2–4, 34 91 381.37 121 382.41–42 165 382.42–383.1 165 382.42–383.2 125 387.23 196n36 387.34–40 125 45 [44] 394.10–23 143 396.2 165 46 [45] 396.11–15 94 398.2–11 74 403.32–404.3 166 47 [46] 404.22–31 94 405.39 140 409.24 121 48 [37] 411.36–38 92 53 [52] 461.21–27 100 462.4–12 100 467.34–37 92 468.22–25 196n35 468.30–36 35–36 L’Envoy 469.3–13 59

7a  The Bride of Lammermoor general 14, 17, 49, 50, 54n63, 62, 128, 139, 146, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 166–68, 183 title-page 110 57 1 4.21 10.36–37 44 14.25–26 43 14.26 44 2 17.21–29 196n46 20.14–22.10 167 21.3–4 119 3 22–30 167 25.5–12 112 4 35.28–36.1 130, 196n36 5 36.20–22 94, 167–68 47.5–34 167 6 48–54 167 7 54–66 167 57.41–42 196n43 58.42–43 196n43 60.40–61.5 42–43

8 68.8–13 138 72.33 196n41 73.34 196n43 9 75–86 167 81.34–35 36 10 90.13–15 143 11 94.31 66 13 109–15 167 15 123.19–21 196n41 16 127–33 167 131.5–11 135 17 137.33–34 143 18 138.17 111 142.41–42 196n46 142.41–143.2 82n15 19 148–54 167 148.7–15 101 151.12–18 130

Index of Passages Discussed  213 154.4–6 101 154.20 102 20 161.26–27 196n41 21 164.9–15 112 169.3–4 131 22 176.42–45 148 23 186.33–37 108 191.43 155n36, 196n42 24 194–200 167 194.23–29 127 25 203.27 196n41 208.41–210.16 167 26 212.15–18 128 214.31–34 119 27 222.32–33 120–21 224.22–23 196n41 29 228.9–14 91

232.27 167 30 233–38 91 238.13 196n46 31 238–43 167 241.37–38 167 243.3–11 196n44 32 244–46 167 245.40–246.9 196n44 33 247–54 167 247.2–6 94, 167–68 248.20–250.9 196n44 251.19–29 196n44 34 257.5–6 196n42 262.8–10 151 35 262.24–30 113 263.18, 34–35 196n42 264.42–43 168

7b  A Legend of the Wars of Montrose general 17, 24–25, 54n63, 152–53n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 168 title-page 110 1 7–12 29 10.25–26 57 12.9 196n48 2 12.30–36 96 21.1 136 3 21.31–35 108 23.1–2 130 4 25.14–22 106 28.24 196n48 5 37.29–31 72 38.32–33 121 6 46.33–35 155n40 52.34–53.6 138 8 60.2–4 136

11 84.40–42 124 12 91.3 76 13 97.8–13 104 101.3 123 101.21–22 121 14 118.1–5 141 15 121.4–12 96 17 137.3 73 138.33–35 196n48 18 150.16–21 38–39 20 157.25–28 103 21 165.10–25 75 23 183.1–4 196n48 183.9–19 15

8  Ivanhoe general 17, 20n19, 45, 49, 54n63, 115n34, 128, 139, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 168–69, 194 title-page 110 Dedicatory Epistle 5.35–6.17 15 10.37–42 169 12.4–19 57 12.8–10 168 1 15.5–9 93 2 22.31–39 168 30.38 196n50

31.9–10 196n50 40.2–10 93 5 46.20–26 169 48.27–30 43 6 54.2–5 169 63.32–33 197n54 7 65.17–28 196n49 8 76.2–9 196n49

214  Index of Passages Discussed 78.43–79.11 152 10 93.20–26 89 96.38–39 89 11 101.29–38 99 106.3–36 139 106.13–16 141–42 12 108.7–19 168 115.27–34 36–37 13 117.24–30 109 17 152.8–9 140 152.12–15 144 18 158.16–19 136 19 159.11–16 89 165.7–8 154n23 20 171.20–27 89 21 179.2–5 169 23 186.33–37 93–94 24 193.13–14 93–94 194.9–10 48 201.14–17 119, 169 26 210.28–40 169 210.39 121 212.1–2 169 28 234.17 136 239.26–27 79 239.41–43 169 29 243.12–17 125

247.21–22 122–23 249.7–8 123 32 274.9–12 169 282.27 196n50 33 285.25–286.40 197n54 35 301–11 168 305.31–36 197n53 307.41–42 196n50 308.39 197n54 310.21–22 120 311.17–19 197n53 37 319–30 168 319.10–11 169 320.35–36 197n53 321.13–17 197n53 322–23 197n53 38 336.19–20 123 39 339.19 153n8 341.30–31 123 40 348.2 99 352.43 196n50 365.11–25 37 42 370.27–32 108 44 392.7–8 108 399.38–39 117–18, 169 401.30–36 149

9  The Monastery general 44, 54n63, 109, 152n2, 153n4, 154n13, 155n37, 155n39, 169–71 title-page 109 Introductory 3.24–4.3 98 Epistle 8.13–14 9 11.23 134 18.32–36 197n62 23.13–15 16 Answer 27.41–28.19 12–13 30.5–8 92 1 31–35 29 31.5–15 92, 108 4 48.20–23 75 48.20–24 171 5 57.2–9 170 58.8–9 170 59.14–15, 197n57 29–30 59.30 170 61.1–2, 8 197n57

6 67.30–33 170 70.19–24 170 70.37–38 170 71.10 170 71.15–16 170 72.41–42 170 7 73.12 133–34 8 83.31–33 170 9 86.32–36 197n62 94.11–15 147 10 97.25–28 108 98.10–11 197n56 99.40 197n56 100.31–33 170 11 112.36–38 152, 171 12 113.5–6 115n32 119.16–21 151, 171 13 120–27 170

Index of Passages Discussed  215 120.40–121.2 60 124.38–41 121 14 128.2–11 115n30 134.21–24 78 136.25–28 197n58 137.1–2 197n56 15 145.19–20, 197n58 34–45 16 159.13–15 170 17 161.24–29 108 163.21 170 164.17–18 170 18 172.8–10 197n56 19 180.40–41 197n56 20 188.10–36 197n58 189.19 64 194.13–14 139 22 203.41 197n58 23 209.41–210.1 122 24 223.4 197n62 224.35–37 119 27 247.39–42 197n58

250.30–251.3 170 28 255.5–11 94 29 264.2–6 94 269.23–25 123 270.22–24 70 270.42–271.5 197n58 30 281.9–21 170 282.24 197n56 284.14–15 197n56 31 288.19–21 170 290.17–23 170 290.17–31 145 290.20 73 33 300.34–38 34 302.27–30 170 302.40 153n8 35 317.6–9 81 325.17 103 36 329.10–12 103 37 336.28–29 93 342.15–16 170

10  The Abbot general 17, 34, 44, 46, 54n63, 93, 109, 139, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 171–72 title-page 109 1 5.7–8 109 7.4–11 172 2 17.10–11 122–23 3 20.5–9 87 4 33.16–17 171 41.7–42.4 171 42.2 153n6 6 49.5–7 123 7 57.1–6 80 10 76.31–39 124 13 101.41–42 171 14 102–111 171 105.4–6 197n64 105.28–31 60 106.42–43 80 110.25–26 136, 197n64 15 113.3–4 197n64 17 135.4–8 39 19 163.22–24 171 21 187.13–16 60 22 199.4–25 29–30

207.7 135, 154n17 25 237.22–24 64 26 240–47 171 240.18–22 77–78 27 249–59 171 249.5–10 77 250.11–13, 42 197n64 251.46 64 28 259–70 172 31 288.26–32 172 32 297–314 172 297.31–36 132 298.39 131 33 314.31–37 115n30 34 322.2–9 115n30 35 332.7–9 115n30 36 343.33–37 102–03 37 354.2–6 115n30 363.13–14 122–23 38 367.18–19 172

216  Index of Passages Discussed 11  Kenilworth general 18, 44, 49, 54n63, 126, 139, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 172–74 title-page ([393]) 109 1 1–11 154n16 1.25 136, 155n30 2.9–10 40, 155n30 3.40–42 155n30 7.22 67 8.26–27 155n30 11.23–24 137 2 11.36–37 91 12.1–18 76 12.35–36 135 12.40 135 3 22.32 155n30 27.7 155n30 4 27.39–28.1 8 28.31–33 173 34.4–6 137 5 37.8–13 97 6 45.32–36 94 52.7–12 197n68 7 56.29–35 97 8 80.7 74 85.2 155n30 9 85–94 174 87.16–17 62 88.36–37 137 91.20–23 174 13 125.32–126.6 172–73 14 131.30–36 96 15 137.37–40 151 16 163.31–34 134 17 166.5–10 97 168.25–32 172 173.3–4 197n67 176.23–177.8 172 19 195.23–25 173 20 202.2–4, 35–38 173 21 209.26 173 211.11–13 149

22 216.17–25 94, 103 218.32–33 11 221.32–37 197n68 24 239.28 138 240.19 136 240.19–34 173 240.34 64 240.41–241.2 123 25 252.12–14 68 27 265.19–22 107 29 274.19–23 97 281.12–13 141 30 282.6–13 111 284.35–41 35 285.14–39 151 31 297.10–11 145 33 311.35–37 173 312.36–37 174 34 315.36–39 97, 104, 149 326.6–7 145 326.26 143 35 332.27–30 123 36 334.15–20 173 338.26–339.2 173 339.29 173 37 342.2–4 86, 173 346.35 173 38 352.10–11 86, 173 353.8–10 173 355.32 173 357.8–9 173 41 379.12–16 94 381.21–22 197n68 389.25–26 173 390.16–17 173 391.7–8 173 392.20–27 174

12  The Pirate general 14, 16, 20n19, 54n63, 139, 143, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 174–76 title-page 110 2 17.18–20 127 18.31 155n31 3 21.25–26 175



22.13–14 149 22.17–24 13–14 23.19–25 175

Index of Passages Discussed  217 4 25.25 111 30.23–32 28–29 34.26–35.5 125 5 39.15–23 98 39.24–25 57 11 98.10 111 101.37–38 147 13 121.5–11 107 124.5–7 34 125.36–40 34 15 137.2–6 94 16 144.2–6 94 144.34–145.2 132 18 168.30–32 68 19 174.16 175 174.16–21 151 177.13 175 20 186.32–36 91–92 193.3–10 147 21 200.40 175 22 204.32–36 175

23 218.36 111 230.22–26 149 25 240.32–34 57–58 26 252.17 134 28 267.44–268.1 174 29 269.28–33 92 32 298.10 111 302.35–36 82n16 33 307.37 123 34 312.38 111 321.24–25 79 35 325.29 64 329.7–13 142 36 338.23–27 175 38 353.13–14 85–86 39 360.31–35 148 40 369.16–20 148 41 381.41 123 42 389.12–13 175 391.31–32 175

13  The Fortunes of Nigel general 14, 44, 45, 54n63, 65, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 176–78 title-page 110 Introductory Epistle 7.4–7 147 15.5–8 67 15.26–27 16 1 19.5–15 105 3 48.32–33 177 5 61.12 111 66.40–67.24 176 68.4–70.11 177 6 78.22–24 177 8 97.19–25 152 9 110.14 177 110.42–43 178 111.40–43 58–59 114.41–115.2 176–77 115.3–22 177 117.29–30 128 10 126.15–22 123 12 150.1–8 176 150.2 176 13 151.15 111 156.3–7 143–44 157.27 177 15 169.19–21 177 173.39 176 16 178.33 136

178.33–37 176 185.8–29 58 17 191.22 67 195.41–46 70–71 18 200.18 111 20 220.32–37 147 21 228.2–6 105 230.41–42 67 237.21–24 177–78 22 246.7–28 33 248.10 68 23 256.4 65 257.11–18 147 258.4 138 258.11–13 178 258.40 65 24 267.15–18, 40–3 64–65 26 283.30 111 27 292.41–293.6 13 296.1–24 34–35 296.11–13 140 300.5 178 28 311–21 177 311.30–34 80 318.12–13 198n73

218  Index of Passages Discussed 320.13 198n73 29 333.29–30 177 31 345.2–6 86 352.36–39 177 32 356.37–357.14 177 357.3–8 144 357.15–28 177 358.1 144 33 370.8–11 177 34 375.15 177

35 386.19 154n16 388.16 155n36 36 388–97 177 394.13–14 134 394.34–395.9 198n73 37 397.8–28 33 398.15–399.21 177 402.36 177 405.26 177

14  Peveril of the Peak general 17, 21, 54n63, 118, 139, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 178–79, 200 title-page 110 Prefatory Letter 5.34–36 149 7.39–40 12 9.43–10.3 148 12.3–4 16 5 47.30–36 80 54.19–25 80 7 72.2–4 136 10 98.32–33 89 11 112.17–18 80 113.7–8 80 12 118.10–26 128 120.33 122 13 129.5–6 108 14 139.10–12 108 145.15–16 68 15 151.7–8 69 153.31–41 179 155.18 179 155.38 69 16 162.2–11 108 17 173.35–174.3 124 18 187.24 179 20 202.17–19 108 21 210.2–3 86, 108 213.26 82

213.37–40 72 218.33–35 13 23 236.17–24 78 27 280.3–4 155n40 282.43 138 30 319.8–10 78 31 327.23–24 140 32 340.33–34 40 34 352.26–28 33 356.36–40 179 36 379.18–19 117 37 380.11–13 105 39 395.32 77 406.8–17 78 40 414.7–8 78 41 422.14–16 178 43 439.7–36 178 440.23–30 119 441.10–36 178 44 443.37–39 18 45 452.8–15 108 455.2–7 149 455.12–14 179 46 460.2–6 108 47 468.37–469.6 18 48 478.26–32 178–79

15  Quentin Durward general 17, 18, 20n18, 20n19, 20n21, 45, 46, 54n63, 83, 116, 153n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 179–81 Introduction 13.26 132 20.33 8 21.9 12 21.10–12 8 1 23–29 29 23.6–7 180

23.9–12 21–22 26.1–4 180 4 45.36–46.17 97 49.2–6 180 5 59.3–6 106 6 68.16–20 98

Index of Passages Discussed  219 76.31–37 25 77.41–43 98 7 91.34–36 181 8 92.26–30 97 102.10–12 179 102.36–43 147 10 118.3–8 99 123.14–27 99 132.6–8 97 11 12 142.4–8 35 148.36–40 127 13 155.9–35 181 16 177–87 179 181.11–14 180 18 201.23–34 181 19 213.10–13 180 20 217.7–10 89 220.14–20 89 221.20 89 22 236.12–18 180 239.39–40 180 242.21–22 49 242.21–23 180

23 253.26–31 76 25 273.40–43 37 277.14–17 115n21 27 292.15–18 97 28 311.28–33 180 312.12 180 314.37 181 29 318.11–14, 20 180 320.13–17 72–73 30 325.3–5 97 333.14–16 179–80 333.15–16 124 338.7 143 31 340.21–24 151 32 348.27–31 127 349.20–21 82n21 351.26–28 115n21 33 366.3–4 181 34 368.5–6 74 372.27–28 115n21 37 395.30 180–81 398.28–29 18 400.40–401.11 144

16  Saint Ronan’s Well general 17, 54n63, 83, 126, 139, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 181–83 title-page 102, 150 1 1.6–9 106 6.3–4 150 11.23 154n19 2 12.3–6 183 16.7–8 182 3 24.3–7 183 29.18–19 154n19 4 32.3 183 35.5–10, 41–43 143 5 39.26 149 6 49.20 198n79 50.34–40 123 53.26 182 53.39–40 151 7 57.15–16 56 64.41–42 182 67.17 182 67.29–68.22 198n79 69.4–6 182 8 70.4–6 105 75.9–16 182 76.27–77.23 150 79.6 135 80.4–7 150 9 80.33–34 97

85.1 182–83 86.5 182–83 10 93.22–24 143 11 99.17 182 100.29 155n40 12 107.41–43 147 14 128.2 138 15 135.24 182 136.39 182 140.3–9 147 142.12–14 109 16 144.2–4 34 17 153.3–9 108 155.1 182 18 163.32–34 181 19 177.3–5 99 20 181.23 182 195.29–31 56 21 196.6–10 91 22 207–13 91 208.10–13 183 23 215.35 183 216.3 183 24 225.16–19 182 226.3–5 182

220  Index of Passages Discussed 26 236.21–22 127 245.26–28 139 27 249.6–8 183 249.12 181 28 254.20–21 183 29 267.3–6 183 30 284.42–43 181 287.2–8 148

287.4–5 181 32 304.9–13 30 34 324.11–12 123 330.32–34 39 36 351.6–8 151 351.30 182 38 360.19 182 372.37–42 198n79

17  Redgauntlet general 14, 20n17, 45, 54n63, 83, 139, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 183–84 Letter 2 1      125.6–126.8  33 9.4–9 30 126.6–8 57 10.37–38 11 129.19–20 30–31 12.36–13.5 156n48 134.19–22 184 12.39–13.1 198n82 135.39 117 13.31 198n82 2 143.31–34 33 13.31–33 156n48 3 144–52 184 13.34–35 198n82 150.6 138 4 159.11–19 151 Letter 4 23.39–24.2 145 159.12–19 183–84 29.8–14 156n48 7 177.40–42 131 Letter 5 35.8–9 198n82 178.35 147 9 204.31–205.4 147 Letter 6 44.8–9 123 10 205–15 184 Letter 7 49–64 184 11 216.2–3 138 62.4–7 123 216.41–43 30 Letter 8 65.6–7 198n82 12 229–40 184 71.38–40 156n48 234.11–12 129 71.38–72.3 198n82 13 240–51 184 72.1 198n82 248.26–32 11 72.8 183 250.32 82n16 15 272.10–11 120 Letter 9 73–75 184 16 279.25–26 184 Letter 10 76.18–20 156n48 17 292.36–37 136 76.19–20 198n82 18 303.16–17 138 77.6 134 19 313.16–17 136 316.41–317.2 125 Letter 11 84.26–34 25–26 22 350.25 143 Letter 12 102.7–23 183 23 361.14–39 52n35 113.27–28 117, 183 ConLetter 13 121.41–122.40 57 clusion 378.24 40

18a  The Betrothed general 17, 49, 54n63, 83–84, 116, 153n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 184–86, 188–89 title-page 109 Introduction 3.5–7 55 5.32–43 55 1 14.13–22 22

3 26.13–15 185 32.36–37 198n84 4 38.19–21 185

Index of Passages Discussed  221 40.32–33 185 5 43.12–15 184 44.17–20 68 8 64.6–12 185 67.18–19 198n85 67.22 185 67.26–27 198n84 67.37 185 68.29–33 198n85 9 75.17–19 198n84 77.36–78.1 48–49 79.2 198n87 11 93.3 198n87 13 100.2–5 111–12 109.20–22 198n86 14 111.26 101 15 121.19–23 185–86 129.17 65 129.23–24 76 129.37–39 198n87 16 136.12–14 198n87 17 144.9 198n85 145.1 198n87 18 159.2–3 184 19 168.17–22 198n87 171.4 198n87

21 177.24–25 86 181.39 198n85 22 187.5–11 185 187.7 101, 102 23 193.9–11 185 197.4–5 198n86 200.15–17 185 24 201.21–25 102, 151 203.23–24 198n84 25 208.12–14 102, 150 208.16 115n27 26 211.26–28 108 27 226.40–227.2 198n87 227.12–15 198n85 28 230.2–4 108 29 239.38–40 185 30 250.5–8 100–01 251.29 100–01 254.30 198n87 254.39–40 198n86 256.18–21 101 31 257.2–10 101, 108 263.8–11 185 Conc­lusion 267.17–20 101 274.41–42 185

18b  The Talisman general 17, 45, 49, 54n63, 61–62, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 186–87, 188–89 title-page 109 1 3.6–8 187 2 11.3 186 17.5–9 186 4 39–50 187 41.29–35 68–69 5 50.13–17 187 6 54.20–27 88 7 67.26–28 48 72.17–19 186 8 74.39–40 123 81.4 198n89 9 90.35–37 18–19 10 94.36–39 135 98.2 154n24 11 102.27–33 108 13 125.2–9 111 126.14 198n89 14 134.6–9 186 15 144.17–20 198n90 145.25 198n90

145.26 198n90 18 159–71 187 161.21 186 20 182.39–40 187 183.3 187 193.14 198n89 21 194.2–7 106–07 22 201.9–11 186 202.8–10 186 202.40–203.1 186 23 215.18–19 186 217.4–6 186 26 236.12–24 106 27 252.43–253.2 186 256.5–6 186 256.42–257.1 186 257.5–8 186 28 261–78 187 268.16–17 186 271.1–24 187

222  Index of Passages Discussed 19  Woodstock general 17, 44, 46, 54n63, 116, 126, 139, 152n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 187–88 title-page 110 Preface 3–6 188 1 7–9 188 11.9–10 153n6 13.26–16.22 30 16.21–23 120 2 20.28 65 24.9–10 188 26.13–16 61 3 43.6–8 8–9 45.36 118 4 46.6–20 100 52.15 100 53.32 100 54.42–55.2 187 5 56–67 188 56.9–15 109 57.14 66 6 68–77 187 68.2–13 96 69.8–27 47 71.1–7 96 76.41–43 135 7 77–95 118, 187 81.10–11 60 84.23–24 35 85.36–41 22 90.8–10 119 8 96.26 67 99.28 118 9 101–13 118, 188 10 116.35–38 149 11 120.5–7 107–08 131.20 115n22 12 139.18 187 13 141–54 118, 188 146.24 120 152.34 120 14 154.27 107 157.33–34 61 15 166–78 118, 188 168.39–43 52n41 16 179–93 118, 188 179.2–3 100

183.40–41 117 191.24–25 100 17 193.33–34 187–88 196.13–25 188 19 211.36 132 20 225.27–28 101 21 234.8 102 237.25–27 138, 188 244.10–11 187 245.30–31 188 22 250.7–251.41 187 23 257.2 187 24 274.9 187 275.40–43 30 25 282.31–35 94 26 296.43–297.4 9 297.8–9 121 27 313.14–15 136 315.38–42 188 316.39–44 59 28 318–31 188 321.34–45 52n41 325.20–327.26 118 329.15 64 29 331–43 118 30 343.38–344.1 124 344.39–345.8 77 351.35 64 31 361.36 117 362.27 115n22 32 363–82 118 363.2–8 96 369.10–11 68 376.10–11 77 380.41–43 52n41 382.5 115n22 33 382–92 118 382.18 97 382.23, 28 115n22 383.2 115n22 384.2 115n22 34 392–96 118 37 412.34–35 118

20  Chronicles of the Canongate general 44, 54n63, 84, 152n2, 153n3, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 188–89 Introduction 4.34–5.34 12 5.35 9 5.35–38 16

8.17–19 50 9.12–22 85 1 20.2–21.8 142

Index of Passages Discussed  223 2 25.43–26.3 189 3 29.34–31.7 30 36.20 77 4 38.2–4 99 51.25–27 30 54.23–55.2 189 6 55.28–40 38 58.30–31 57 [7] 67.5–12 50 67.40–68.2 189 7 [HW 1] 72.40–73.1 47 76.23 189 8 [HW 2] 76.28–36 92 9 [HW 3] 84.22–24 189 11 [HW 5] 118.22–23 189 118.24–31 189

119.19–20 189 13 [TD 2] 130–46 189 14 [Preface] 147.6–10 107 15 [SD 1] 159.16–22 150 16 [SD 2] 180.19 68 17 [SD 3] 187.12–16 109 188.8–9 140 20 [SD 6] 213.35–36 80–81 21 [SD 7] 219.13–14 33–34 223.8–9 40 223.37–224.1 124 24 [SD 10] 247.25–26 138–39 28 [SD 14] 273.31–39 104–05 29 [Conclusion] 287.9–10 189

21  The Fair Maid of Perth general 17–18, 44, 45, 49, 54n63, 153n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 189–91 Narrative 3.8–12 108 9.27–29, 34–40 50 1 11.5–8 111 11.28–29 81 2 28.35–36 190 29.19–29 190 5 51.38 155n36 6 53.9–10 108–09 7 63.2–3 199n96 9 92.9–11 190 12 124.26–28 141 14 145.27–29 190 152.11–12 190 15 157.26–27 190 166.38 123 17 182.9–10 136

191.41–192.5 124–25 192.3–5 190–91 19 200.34–35 130 21 222.4–6 190 229.3–6 48 22 238.7–29 190 23 245.21–22 199n96 27 291.23–25 190 31 332.36–37 190 32 334.23–25 191 347.4–5 199n96 348.14–24 28 348.32–33 190 34 377.30 190 35 380.13–14 117 36 385.13–15 117

22  Anne of Geierstein general 17, 18, 20n21, 54n63, 153n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 191 1 3.13–16 19n1 4.27–40 27–28 2 21.3 82n21 21.33–36 151 22.36–38 123 5 54.2–3 191 6 58.7–12 109 60.1 191 8 75.2–6 111 10 102.4–6 191 102.14–15 191 104.32–34 191 15 153.30–31 108, 152 156.1–2 130 163.18–26 134

166.11–16 191 166.12 123 16 179.1–3 130 17 184.10–14 101 19 203.16–28 154n16 213.38 67 214.5–7 135 23 253.5–8 92 24 262.34–40 191 25 275.2–3 135 28 304.26–28 98 305.19–22 39 30 325.11–13 191 31 340.29–32 111 32 348.34–38 127

224  Index of Passages Discussed 33 366.6–12 112 35 383.31–34 125 36 392.13–17 103



393.9–10 191 394.36–37 121

23a  Count Robert of Paris general 17, 54n63, 153n2, 153n4, 153n13, 155n37, 155n39, 191–92 5 69.13–14 123 70.19–71.10 192 6 79.4–11 192 8 92.2–6 109 94.34–38 192 10 112.23–31 146 117.20–121.33 192 118.13–14 199n101 119.16 199n101 12 128.24–37 199n101 129.3–4 199n101 17 179.8–13 97 180.36 146 18 192.31–37 97 19 206.8–9 192

20 211.38–40 48 212.34–35 192 22 235.6 192 25* 263.12–20 148 27* 274.4–6 152 276.33–38 199n100 279.41–42 123 28* 287.2–7 129 289.29–31 129 292.26–29 199n100 29* 299.26–30 199n100 301.5–11 199n100 31* 313.22–23 123 35* 365.11–14 129

23b  Castle Dangerous general 14, 17, 44, 54n63, 153n2, 153n4, 154n13, 155n37, 155n39, 192–93, 194 1 3.11 107 8.20–24 193 3 24.19–21 86 24.19–22 192 4 30.7–28 193 5 37.12–40.33 193 42.10 193 7 55.16–30 192–93 8 69.14–16 193 9 93.32–34 152

18 156.5–157.21 193 156.28–29 137 19 168.14–41 199n103 169.32–34 199n103 170.8–10 199n103 20 172.2–10 192–93 Address* 194–208 148 195.1–6 149 208.23–25 129 208.32 149

25a Introductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Waverley to A Legend of the Wars of Montrose

15.20–20.26 203n7 73.32–34 52n39 110.7–113.40 195n7 121.16–30 195n7 125.14–23 195n7 126.10–16 30–31 150.8–11 195n11 166.9–31 161



290.2–293.32 50 293.30–32 49–50 310.35–311.41 196n33 314.23–26 196n33 335.2–338.17 50 335–43 166 434 19

25b Introductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Ivanhoe to Castle Dangerous

11.19 16 12.7–11 168 14.3–16.29 168 18.22–23 110



53.41–43 6n6 136.4–6 174 557.2–6 12

General Index

Abbotsford library 4–5, 7, 9, 12, 19n3, 80, 113, 116, 121, 132, 178 Adamson, Henry: The Muses Threnodie 17–18, 190 Addison, Joseph 78, 140, 159 Adolphus, John Leycester 31 ‘Adventures of Aboulfouaris’ 72 Advocates Library 9, 19n8, 178 Aesop 141 Alexander, J. H. 20n16, 54n73, 156n41, 156n51, 196n39, 197n69, 199n104 Alexander, Michael 93 Allainval, Léonor-Jean-Christine Soulas d’: L’Embarras des richesses 80 Allan, William 43 Amadis of Gaul 183 Ancient British Drama (ed. Robert Dodsley) 174 Anderson, James 17, 20n24 Anderson, W. E. K. (Eric) 53n49 Ariosto, Ludovico 11, 141, 158, 174; Orlando furioso 73, 144–46, 170 Armstrong, John: The Art of Preserving Health 85 Ashmole, Elias: Antiquities of Berkshire 18 ‘At Skipton in Craven there’s never a haven’ 66 Aubrey, John: Miscellanies 19n5 Augustan Review 41 Austen, Jane 28, 142 Author of Waverley 5–6, 12, 16, 31, 98, 110, 149, 169, 176 Bagehot, Walter 24 Baillie, Joanna 84, 141; Constantine Paleologus 112; Count Basil 89; Ethwald 96–97; Orra 77, 89, 95

Bakhtin, Mikhail 2 (Baldwin’s) London Magazine 61–62 Ballantyne, James 37, 50, 65, 83–84, 86, 107, 109, 114n18, 115n37 Ballantyne, John 16, 114n5 Balzac, Honoré de 172 Bandello, Matteo: Novella 34 80 Bannatyne Manuscript 171 Barante, [A. G. P. Brugière, Baron de]: Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne 18, 191 Barbour, John: The Brus 76, 192, 193 ‘Battle of Bothwell Bridge’ 91 Beaumont, Francis and Fletcher, John 108, 111, 114n5; The Coxcomb 107 Beckett, Ruth 158 Bentham, Jeremy 46 Berger, Dieter 112, 113n1, 114n8 Bewick, William 5 Bible 4, 116–26, 139, 157–99 passim; distribution by novel of references to 153n4; favourite expressions from 122; frequency of references to 122, 153n9; points of debate concerning 121–22; terrifying uses of 119; uses for comic effect 118; uses for deep feelings 117–18; uses for resonant names 120; versions of 120–21; virtuoso uses of 118–19; witty uses of 119; Acts 119, 153n9, 165, 170; 1 Chronicles 120; 1 Corinthians 68, 153n9, 165; 2 Corinthians 68–69, 118, 153n9; Daniel 153n9; Deuteronomy 153n9, 173; Ecclesiastes 153n9, 162; Ephesians 153n9; Exodus 122, 173, 191; Ezekiel 153n9; Galatians 164; Genesis 117, 119,

226  General Index 120, 122–24, 180, 191; Haggai 120; Hebrews 121, 153n9, 190, 191; Isaiah 68, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 165, 175, 190; James 170; Jeremiah 118, 120, 153n9; Job 119, 121, 122, 124–26, 153n9, 161, 165, 191; John 153n9; Joshua 153n9; Judges 153n9; 1 Kings 72, 119, 153n9, 177; 2 Kings 153n9, 184; Lamentations 119; Luke 72, 117–18, 122, 169, 190, 191; Mark 153n9; Matthew 68, 118, 122, 170, 179, 190, 193; Numbers 120, 153n9, 167; 1 Peter 120; 2 Peter 68–69; Proverbs 64, 70, 118, 121, 122, 173, 182, 192; Psalms 64, 69, 71–72, 119, 120–21, 122, 160, 161, 165, 166, 173, 175, 189, 190, 192, 193; Revelation 122; Romans 119, 153n9, 170; Ruth 119, 189, 191; 1 Samuel 78–79, 118, 122, 165, 191; 2 Samuel 117, 118, 153n9, 180, 183 Biggins, D. 154n18 Blackwood, William 162 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 159 Blair, Hugh 27 Blamires, Harry 22–23 Blount, Edward 78 ‘Bob of Dumblane’ 66 Boiardo, Matteo Maria 174: Orlando innamorato 144 ‘Bonny Scot made a Gentleman’ 105 Book of Common Prayer 120–21, 162 books: attracting bibliomania 10–12, 19n8; collections of, in the novels 7–9; materiality of 11–12; see also Abbotsford library Booth, Wayne C. 53n47 Boswell, Alexander: Clan-Alpin’s Vow 168 Boswell, James: Life of Johnson 79, 95 Bowring, Sir John 13 Brewer, Wilmon, C. 133, 154n27, 190 British Magazine 21 Brome, Richard: A Jovial Crew 159 Brown, Marshall 112–13 Buchan, John 25, 117 Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of 175; The Rehearsal 141 Buckton, Oliver S. 154n20 Bürger, Gottfried August: Lenore 150

Bunyan, John: The Pilgrim’s Progress 151, 166 Burke, John J. Jr 82n11 Burke, Kenneth 1 Burn, Richard: The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer 163 Burns, Robert 84, 94, 126, 140, 155n39, 159–60; ‘The Deil’s awa wi’ th’ Exciseman’ 160; ‘Epigram on a Visit to Inverary’ 104; The Fornicators Court 19n2; ‘The Highland Widow’ 92; ‘The Holy Fair’ 91, 94; ‘The Ordination’ 94; ‘John Anderson my Jo’ 76, 160; ‘McPherson’s Farewell’ 98; ‘My bony Mary’ 81; ‘O’er the water to Charlie’ 172; ‘On the Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations thro’ Scotland’ 98, 110; ‘Tam o‘ Shanter’ 140–41, 160 Burt, Edmund: Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland 17, 163 Burwick, Frederick 26–27 Butler, Samuel 84, 108, 155n39; Hudibras 94, 141, 163, 188 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 84, 155n39; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 172; The Corsair 175; ‘She walks in beauty’ 175 Cadell, Robert 84, 153n3 Calder, Angus 24, 195n17 Calder, Jenni 24 Caledonian Mercury 157 Callot, Jacques 43 Campbell, Thomas 30, 84; ‘Lochiel’s Warning’ 92, 99; ‘The Turkish Lady’ 104–05 Cant, James 17–18, 190 Carnie, Robert Hay 195n24 Carruthers, Gerard 19n4 Carte, Thomas: A History of the Life of James, Duke of Ormonde 18 ‘Cavalier’s Song’ 66 Cecil, Lord David 24 Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) 141, 146–48, 155n39, 158; Don Quixote 146–48, 183, 194; Novelas ejemplares 146 Chalmers, Alexander 73 Chandler, David 156n52 Channing, E. T. 45

General Index  227 Chantrey, Francis 126 Chaucer, Geoffrey 72, 141, 155n39, 188; The Canterbury Tales 73, 109, 110, 168 Chesterfield, Lord: Letters to His Son 62 ‘Chevy Chace’ 71 Churchill, Charles: The Ghost 69–70; The Prophecy of Famine 87 Cibber, Colley: Richard III 99 Cicero 26, 51, 58, 71, 141, 160; Ad Atticum 63 Clark, Arthur Melville 127 Classical allusions 54n70, 56, 58, 63, 141–44, 158, 160, 165, 174, 175–77, 183, 184, 188, 189, 192 Claudian 177 Cochrane, J. G. 9 Cockshut, A. O. J. 24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 41–42, 46, 84, 141, 150–52, 155n39, 156n53; ‘Christabel’ 101, 102, 150–52, 166, 171, 175; ‘The Dark Ladié’ 151; The Death of Wallenstein (trans.) 110; ‘The Dungeon’ 108, 152; ‘The Knight’s Tomb’ 152, 194; ‘Kubla Khan’ 152, 175; The Piccolomini (trans.) 110; ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ 72–73, 150–51, 171, 175, 184 Collins, William: Ode to Fear 75, 171 Combe, William ‘The Wedding’ 76 Comines, Philippe de: Mémoires 17, 18, 20n21, 181, 191 Comnena, Anna: Histoire de l’Empereur Aléxis 192 contemporaneous reviews 3, 14–15, 16, 20n19, 21, 41, 45, 46, 53n55, 54n65, 61–62, 81–82n2, 82n7, 112, 153n3, 200 Cook, E. Thornton 53n50 Cooney, Seamus 203n7 Corson, James C. 67 Cousin, Louis 192 Cousins, A. D. 198n75 Crabbe, George 8, 84, 141, 159, 166; The Borough 94, 101; ‘Edmund Shore’ 69; ‘The Hall of Justice’, 95; The Parish Register 90; The Village 90 Craig, David 137, 195n24 Craik, T. W. 129

Cranstoun, Helen: ‘Song of Genius’ 106 Critical Review 54n65 Croker, J. W. 81n2 Cromwell, Oliver 60 Culloden, battle of 60 Cunningham, Alan 5, 153n12 Daiches, David 5 Dalgeish, William 12 Dallaway, James: Constantinople Ancient and Modern 192 Dalrymple, Janet 50, 166 D’Arcy, Julian Meldon 6n2, 40 Davie, Donald 25, 28 Davis, Jana 198n71 Defoe, Daniel 23; Robinson Crusoe 96 Dekker, Thomas 108; The Wonder of a Kingdom 99 Dibdin, Charles: ‘Tom and Dick’ 109 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall: The Bibliomania 10, 12; Bibliophobia 10, 19n8 Dickson, Nicholas 153n10 Dodsworth, Martin 6n7, 25 Donne, John 108 Douce, Francis 154n25, 171 Douglas, Gavin 109 ‘Douglas Tragedy’ 103 Dryden, John 21, 27, 29, 31, 84, 109, 141, 155n39, 158, 175, 178; Absalom and Achitophel 170; The Aeneid (trans.) 78, 144; Cymon and Iphigenia 79; Palamon and Arcite 196n49; The Spanish Friar 71, 185; ‘To the Pious Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew’ 91 Dublin Magazine 115n34 Duff, James 108 Dugdale, William: Monasticon Anglicanum 9 Duncan, Ian 21 Edgeworth, Maria 28, 113n1 Edinburgh Christian Instructor 84 Edinburgh Review 153n3 ‘Edom of Gordon’ 90 Edwards, Simon 25 Elfenbein, Andrew 25 Eliot, George 142–43 Eliot, T. S. 48 Elton, Oliver 24

228  General Index epigrams see mottoes Erskine, William 16, 175 European Magazine 20n19 European Review 20n17 ‘Fair Rosamond’ 97 Farquhar, George 141 Ferguson, Col. James 189 Fergusson, Robert: ‘The Daft-Days’ 89 Ferriar, John 188; The Bibliomania 12 Ferrier, Susan 27, 113n1 Ferris, Ina 11–12, 19n7, 24–25 Fielding, Henry 20n19, 28, 32, 41, 44, 45, 83, 141, 142–43; Tumble-down Dick 30; Tom Jones 79 Fiske, Christabel 54n72, 81n1 Flaxman, Thoda L. 24 Fleming, Robert 115n37 Fletcher, John 84, 159; Love’s Pilgrimage 66; Monsieur Thomas 112; Women Pleased 73 Fletcher of Saltoun, Alexander: Two Discourses Concerning the Affairs of Scotland 65 Forster, E. M. 142 Fourdoun, John 177; Scotichronicon 193 Foxes and Firebrands 11 Frenaud, William 109 Frere, J. H. 156n53 ‘Fryer and the Nun’ 67 Galt, John 27 Garbin, Lidia 152n1 Garden, Alexander: [Elegy on the death of Sir James Lawson of Humbie] 113 Garrick, David 108 Garside, Peter D. 11, 203n4 Gaston, Patricia S. 25 Gay, John 84, 140; Acis and Galatea 79; The Beggar’s Opera 85, 97; Fables 112; ‘A True Story of an Apparition’ 99 Gazette of Fashion 82n7 Geneva Bible 121 Gentleman’s Magazine 200 Gerli, E. Michael 156n47 ‘Get up and bar the door’ 98 Gibbon, Edward: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 17, 186, 192 ‘Gil Morrice’ 81

Gillies, R. P. 10, 42, 52n40 Gilpin, William: Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty 81 God’s Revenge against Murther 64–65 Goetsch, Paul 6n1 Goldie, Helen 49 Goldsmith, Oliver 24, 155n39; The Deserted Village 109; She Stoops to Conquer 29 Gordon, Alexander: Itinerarium Septentrionale 113, 160 Gordon, George Huntly 9, 86 Gordon, Robert C. 28, 40–41, 156n50 Gordon, Robert K. 23, 133, 154n26 Gottschalck, Friedrich: Die Sagen und Volksmärchen der Deutschen 19 Grabar, Terry H. 24 Graham, Patrick: Sketches Descriptive of … Perthshire 163 Granger, James: A Biographical History of England 18 Grant, Arthur James 23 Gray, Thomas 81; The Bard 80; Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard 151 Greene, Robert: Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 139 Grellmann, Heinrich: Dissertation on the Gipseys 159, 181 Grierson, Sir Herbert 14 Grim, the Collier of Croydon 79 Groot, Hugo de 57 Grose, Francis 61; A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue 17, 137, 165; A Provincial Glossary 165 Hall, Joseph: Virgidemiarum 96 Hamilton, Antony (Count Grammont) 178 Hamilton of Bangour, William 78, 144 Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von 18–19 Handel, George Frederick 79 Harkin, Patricia 171 Harris, Wendell V. 6n1 Hay, John 67 Hayden, John O. 6n8, 54n65 Henry, Robert: The History of Great Britain 17, 186 Herbelot, Barthlémy d’: Bibliotheque orientale 186 Hillhouse, James T. 6n8

General Index  229 Hobsbaum, Philip 190 Hogarth, William 41, 43 Hogg, James 27 Holinshed, Ralph: Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland 17 Home, John: Douglas 76, 93–94, 107, 189 Homer 143, 155n39, 160; The Iliad 56, 109, 184; The Odyssey 92, 93, 107 Hope, Thomas: Anastasius 80 Hoppner, John: Oriental Tales 65 Horace 58, 140, 141–43, 155n39, 159; Odes 58, 70, 77, 141–43, 160, 177 Hughes, Mrs Thomas 115n28 Hoyland, John: A Historical Survey of … the Gypsies 181 Hume, David 24; The History of England 17, 50–51, 178 Hume, David of Godscroft: The History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus 17, 193 ‘I’ll make ye be fain to follow’ 66 images: clichéd and original 47–49; image chains 49, 172, 183, 184–85; reinforced by intertextual allusions 97 Indagine, John: The Book of Palmestry and Physiognomy 181 Inglis, Tony 18, 166 intertexts see sources Jackson, H. J. 19n8 Jackson-Houlston, C. M. 80, 82n13, 187 Jacobson, Sibyl 37–38, 202 ‘Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead’ 103, 106 Jarvis, Charles 146 Jefferson, D. W. 24, 29, 195n24 Jeffrey, Francis 27, 153n3 ‘Jemmy Dawson’ 90 ‘Johnnie Armstrong’ 85 Johnson, Samuel 21, 24, 79, 84, 132, 141, 149–50, 155n39; The Idler 149–50; The Rambler 27, 149; Rasselas 149; The Vanity of Human Wishes 73, 79, 149 Jones, Catherine 154n18, 196n38 Jonson, Ben 84, 108, 140, 141, 155n39, 163, 171; The Alchemist

67; Bartholomew Fair 112; The Devil is an Ass 80–81; Every Man in his Humour 63; The New Inn 93, 107; Volpone 190 Jordan, Frank 43–44, 45 Jordan, Thomas: ‘The Answer’ 78 Joyce, James 142–43 Juvenal 141; Satires 79, 142, 160 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 27 Kelly, James: A Complete Collection of Scotish Proverbs 137 King, Judy 199n104 Knight’s Quarterly Magazine 20n18 Knox, John 171 ‘Kyng and the Hermyt’ 168 Lamont, Claire 82n20 Langhorne, John: ‘The Wall-Flower’ 87 Lauber, John 21 Leland, John 118 Levy, Lindsay 9, 10, 19n2 Lewin, Judith 154n18, 197n54 Lewis, C. S. 21, 22–23, 27–28 Lewis, M. G. (‘Monk’) 113n1 Leyden, John: ‘Lord Soulis’ 74; Scenes of Infancy 87 ‘Lillibulero’ 76 Lilly, William: Christian Astrology 159 Lincoln, Andrew 201 Lindsay, Sir David 108, 109 Lindsay of Pitscottie, Robert: History of Scotland 65 Linlithgow Palace 7 Livy 71 Lockhart, George of Carnwath: Memoirs 161 Lockhart, J. G. 54n71, 114n5, 115n28, 156n43, 156n44 Logan, John: Runnamede 168 Lokman (Luqman) 186 Lumsden, Alison 2, 19n4, 32, 58 Luther, Martin 121 Lyly, John 78 McClure, J. Derrick 163–64 McCombie, Frank 154n18, 196n45 McCrie, Thomas 84 MacDonald, Andrew: Love and Loyalty 75 McGann, Jerome J. 200

230  General Index Mackenzie, Henry 57 Mackintosh, Donald: A Collection of Gaelic Proverbs 137, 157 Maclaren, Ian 39 Macleod, Donald, Memoirs of 157 McMaster, Graham 6n2 Macpherson, James 185 Magnus, Olaus 175 Malone, Edmund 132 Mandeville, Sir John 192 Mansour (Hakim Abu al-Qasim Mansur Firdausi) 186 Marlowe, Christopher: The Jew of Malta 89 Marmontel, Jean-François: Bélisaire 196n32 ‘Marriage of Sir Gawaine’ 106 Martial 78 Mary, Queen of Scots 60, 171 Mathias, T. J.: The Pursuits of Literature 63 Mayhead, Robin 24 Melrose Abbey 7 Mergenthal, Silvia 197n54 Meston, William: ‘A Lochaber Tale’ 106 Metropolitan 52n40 Mézeray, François [Eudes] de: Histoire de France 17 Mickle, William Julius 84; ‘Cumnor Hall’ 94, 103, 174 Millgate, Jane 31–32, 114n11, 131, 133, 159, 171 Mills, Charles: The History of the Crusades 17, 186 Milton, John 49, 84, 111, 155n39, 188; Comus 69, 141, 166; Lycidas 69, 91; Paradise Lost 69, 100, 141; Paradise Regained 187; Samson Agonistes 131 Moffat, James 153n10 Molière 59 Monro, Robert: Monro his Expedition 17, 168 Monthly Review 45, 54n65, 81–82n2 Montrose, James Graham, 5th Earl of: ‘I’ll never love thee more’ 96 Morritt, J. B. S. 153n12 Morton (Scott’s teacher) 47 Motte Fouqué, Caroline de la: ‘Das Goldene Schloss’ 166–67 Motteux, Peter Anthony 147

mottoes 83–115, 157–99 passim; adding dimensions 95–96; and reader responses 87–88; as moral comments 93–94; ascriptions of 108–09; challenging and puzzling examples of 99–101; changed from sources 101–07, 113; distribution by novel of 83–84; effecting changes of mood 96–97; for general atmosphere 86; how linked to the text 89–93; mismatching examples of 97–98; of Scott’s composition (partly) 105–06, (wholly) 85, 107–08, 111–12; on title-pages 109–10; one-dimensional examples of 85–86; popularity of 84; reasons for adopting 112–13; reinforcing distancing 97–98; reinforcing imagery 97; resonant examples of 87; Scott’s precursors in use of 113 (note 1); Scott’s reasons for adopting 112–13; sequences of 94–95; sources of 84–85; witty examples of 98–99 Müller, Wolfgang 112 Murison, David 163 Murphy, Arthur: The Apprentice 108 Murray, William Henry (brother of Harriet Siddons) 130 Museum; or Record of Literature etc. 20n19 Mylne, Robert 76 Nares, Robert: Glossary 121 narrative voice 32–46, 200, 203; and dialogue 43–46; and persona 35–36; and point of view 36; commenting on the action 36–38; commenting on technique 33–35; in gnomic mode 38–40; qualifications by 40–41; see also Author of Waverley New Monthly Magazine 20n19, 46 Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of 179 Nichols, John: The Progress and Public Processions … of Queen Elizabeth 18, 174 Nisbet, Alexander: A System of Heraldry 113 North American Review 54n65 North, Roger: Examen 178 ‘Not-browne Mayd’ 148

General Index  231 Obsequens, Julius: Julii Obsequentis de Prodigiis Liber 10–11 ‘Old and Young Courtier’ 81 Orr, Marilyn 114n10 Otway, Thomas 108; The Orphan 108; Venice Preserved 86, 91, 98–99, 108 Ovid 11, 57, 155n39, 160, 177 ‘Oysters are a gentle kin’ 76

Procopius: De Bello Gotthico 192 proverbs 137–40, 157–99 passim; collections of 137; distribution by novel of 155n37; favoured by certain characters 139; most frequently used 137; mutation in forms of 138–39; powerful uses of 140; variety of 138; witty uses of 139

Pappon, J. R.: Histoire générale de Provence 18, 191 Parnell, Thomas: ‘Anacreontick’ 70 Parsons, Coleman Oscar 53n51, 157 ‘Patrick Carey’s jovial farewell’ 77 Patten, Robert: History of the Late Rebellion 161 Pennant, Thomas: A Tour in Scotland 17 Penrose, Thomas: ‘The Field of Battle’ 103 Percy, Thomas: Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 81, 85, 90, 97, 106, 148 Petit Jehan de Saintré 108 Petitot, Claude Bernard 17, 181 Phillips, Helen 25 Pittock, Joan 42 Pliny the elder 71 Pliny the younger 71 Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin 110 Pope, Alexander 84, 132, 143, 155n39, 159; The Dunciad 170; Epistle to Bathurst 97; Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot 62; ‘The Happy Life of a Country Parson’ 95; The Iliad (trans.) 56; ‘Occasion’d by some Verses of … Buckingham’ 105; The Odyssey (trans.) 92, 93, 107; Peri Bathous 29 Port Folio 53n55 Postlethwayt, Malachy: The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce 163 Pottle, Frederick A. 2 Prestonpans, battle of 48 Prior, Matthew 141, 148–49; ‘A Better Answer’ 148; Alma 148; ‘The Dove’ 97, 104, 149; ‘Down-Hall’ 148; ‘Hans Carvel’ 105; Henry and Emma 148–49; ‘The Ladle’ 148; Solomon 149; ‘The Thief and the Cordelier’ 110, 148

Quarterly Review 20n19, 81n2, 146 Qu’ran 186 Rabelais, Œuvres de Maitre François 18 Radcliffe, Ann 24, 28, 113n1 Ramsay, Allan: A Collection of Scots Proverbs 137; The Gentle Shepherd 68 Ray, John: A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs 137 readers: and explanatory notes 4; and mottoes 87–88; and the practice of skipping 31, 57, 58, 61, 89, 96, 200; inclusion and exclusion of 4, 58–61; Scott targeting a wide variety of 57–62; textual bonding of with Author 64–67 Redfern, Owen 38–39 Reed, Isaac 132, 154n23, 154n24, 154n25 Reeve, Clara 24 Rembrandt Hamenszoon van Rijn 43 Richard Coeur de Lion 168 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa 186 ‘Rising of the North’ 76 Ritson, Joseph 66, 70–71; The NorthCountry Chorister 105 Robertson, Fiona 2, 197n67 Robertson, Struan 144 Robertson, William 50 Rosa, Salvator 41 Rose, William Stewart: ‘Edward the Martyr’ 80, 185 Ross, Alexander: Helenore 74, 166 Rota Club 61 Rowlands, Samuel: The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head Vaine 76 Royal Library, Naples 193 Sacheverell, William: An Account of the Isle of Man 178 Sallust 11

232  General Index Schiller, Friedrich 110 Schreyer, Sebald 65 Scot, Reginald: The Discoverie of Witchcraft 17, 160 Scotsman 62 Scott, Walter: builds Abbotsford 7; his daily routine 12; his verbal memory 61, 70, 72–75, 78, 80, 85, 102–05, 133, 134; Bizarro 193; The English Minstrelsy (ed.) 183; ‘Henry Fielding’ 53n47; Journal 61, 84, 126, 146, 147, 194; The Lay of the Last Minstrel 109–10, 171; Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (ed.) 31–32, 70, 74, 85, 91, 103, 106, 161, 171, 200; ‘The Noble Moringer’ 166; ‘Notices concerning the Scottish Gypsies’ 159; Quarterly Review, self-review in 146; ‘Samuel Richardson’ 6n7; Reliquiæ Trotcosienses 9–10; The Siege of Malta 193–94; for the Waverley Novels see topical entries in this index, and ‘Index of Passages Discussed’ Scott, William 113n1 Seafield, James Ogilvie, 1st Earl of 138 Secret History of the Court of James the First 176 Seward, Anna 79; ‘From thy waves, stormy Lannow, I fly’ 70 Shakespeare, William 8–9, 11, 20n19, 31, 38, 46, 63, 84, 116, 126–37, 139, 157–99 passim; alterations of 133–34; distribution by novel of references to 153–54n13; frequency of references to 135; identification of debts to 132–33; light use of 128; linked with gnomic wisdom 128; repeated uses of passages from 134–35; resonant uses of 130; Scott’s admiration of 126; textual and interpretative issues regarding 132; unfamiliar passages in 129–30; uses by characters for self-analysis 131; uses of for human behaviour 126–28; uses of for profound sentiments 128–29; uses of to deepen characterisation 130–31; All’s Well that Ends Well 100; Antony and Cleopatra 89, 132; As You Like It 63–64, 86, 89, 92, 95,

98, 106, 127–28, 132, 135, 154n29, 182, 188; The Comedy of Errors 91, 129–30; Coriolanus 130; Hamlet 62, 68, 90, 127, 128, 129, 130, 135, 137–38, 154n29, 160, 167, 171, 180, 182, 183, 187, 188; 1 Henry IV 64, 88, 99, 127, 132, 135–37, 154n29, 158, 159, 160, 161, 171, 173, 176–77; 2 Henry IV 65, 69, 76, 109, 127, 133, 135–37, 154n29, 158, 160, 188; Henry V 69, 76, 130, 149, 154n29, 158, 161, 198n77; 1 Henry VI 100, 109, 158, 185, 188, 199n96; 2 Henry VI 8, 92, 134, 180, 190, 199n96; 3 Henry VI 95–96, 128–29, 191; Henry VIII 92; Julius Caesar 64, 76, 155n29, 173, 188; King John 93, 97, 99, 132, 155n29, 176; King Lear 64, 72, 127, 129, 132, 135, 154n29, 173, 175, 176, 187; Love’s Labour’s Lost 91, 155n29, 174; Macbeth 64, 68, 85–86, 94, 97, 106–07, 128, 130, 131, 133–34, 135, 154n29, 159, 160, 167, 173, 182, 185; Measure for Measure 90, 94, 128, 155n29, 166; The Merchant of Venice 86, 91, 100–01, 128, 132–33, 135, 154–55n29, 169, 192, 202; The Merry Wives of Windsor 65–66, 67, 72, 129, 135, 154n29, 159, 171; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 56, 91–92, 107, 127, 128, 131, 134, 135, 154n29, 171, 172, 182; Much Ado about Nothing 31, 64, 83, 91, 95, 129, 130, 131, 135, 154n29, 182, 187; Othello 56, 78, 127, 131, 133, 135, 154n29, 158, 164, 170, 173, 182, 186–87; ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ 99; Richard II 77, 101, 126–27, 128, 131, 155n29, 187, 198n92; Richard III 62, 77, 97, 99, 130–31, 134, 135, 155n29, 176; Romeo and Juliet 56, 86, 94, 131, 135, 155n29, 158, 167–68; The Taming of the Shrew 108–09, 155n29; The Tempest 110, 155n29, 159, 168, 172, 175, 185; Timon of Athens 95; Troilus and Cressida 105, 134; Twelfth Night 56, 89, 128, 130, 132, 135, 154n29; The Two Gentlemen of Verona 93–94, 99; The Two Noble Kinsmen 94; The Winter’s Tale 89, 93, 159, 173

General Index  233 Shaw, Harry E. 200 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 140; ‘Ah! cruel maid’ 160; The Critic 109 Shortreed, Robert 13 Sibbald, Robert: Scotia Illustrata 113 Siddons, Harriet 130 Siddons, Sarah 182 Sidney, Sir Philip 171 Simmons, Clare A. 53n46 Simond, Louis: Switzerland 18, 191 Simpson, David 154n18 Simson, Archibald: Hierogliphica Animalium 11 Singer, Daniella E. 198n75 Sir Bevis of Hampton 193 Skelton, John 108; ‘The Tunning of Elynour Rumming’ 106 Skene, James 5, 13, 18, 191 Smith, Adam: Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres 26 Smith, Charlotte 113n1 Smollett, Tobias 28; Humphry Clinker 196n37; Peregrine Pickle 176 Somers’ Tracts 17, 176, 178 Somervile, William: Hobbinol 77–78 Somerville, James, 11th Baron Somerville: Memorie of the Somervilles 162 Sorensen, Janet 155n38 sources: authors prominent in choice of 140–41, 155n39; censorings of 65–67; combinations of 78–79; cumulative effect of 152; danger of spoiling 49–51; debate over exhaustibility of 15–16; distribution by novel of allusions to 31, 116, 152–53n2, 153n4, 153–54n13, 155n37, 155n39; extra-library 12–15; familiar from later usages 79; free treatments of 70–78; historical texts as 16–19; impairments of 72–73; mechanical and original treatments of 55–56; misleading ascriptions of 80–81; obscure examples of 80; uses of for mottoes 84–85; uses of in narrative description 81; witty uses of 67–70 Southey, Robert: ‘To A. S. Cottle’ 76, 78; ‘Rudiger’ 101 Spagnolo, Joannes Baptista: Eclogue 79 Spectator 78, 79, 108, 159

Spenser, Edmund 84, 155n39, 158, 177; The Faerie Queene 91, 141, 183 Staunton, Howard 132 Steele, Richard 79, 110 Steevens, George 133–34, 154n25 Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy 47, 175 Stoddart, John 102 Stovel, Bruce 142–43, 144 Strutt, Joseph 17, 61, 168, 171 style 21–54; and texture 3–4, 16, 17, 21, 27–28, 45, 47, 116, 157, 165–69, 174, 176, 200–02; Ciceronian 26–27; ‘circumbendibus’ 29–31; distancing effect of 31–43, 97–98; ludic 200–03; objections to, and defences of 3, 21–29, 41–43, 49–51; pictorial effects in 43; polyphonic 2, 202; ‘smart’ 116, 153n3, 176, 181, 183, 188, 189 Sully, Maximilien de Bethune, duc de 176 Swift, Jonathan 155n39; Memoirs of Captain John Creichton (compiled) 162; ‘Rove not from Pole to Pole’ 105 Swinton, John of Kimmerghame 115n31 Tacitus 71; Annals 63 Tailor, Robert: The Hogge hath Lost his Pearle 101 Templar Rule 17, 168, 169 Terence: Adelphoe 178 Terry, Daniel 95, 153n12 textual bonding: between Author and readers 62–67, 148, 164; between characters 62–64, 67, 117, 135, 157–58, 164, 183 Thomas of Erceldoue 193 Thomson, James: The Seasons 78, 85, 97 ‘Through the kirk-yard | I met wi’ the Laird’ 66 Tickell, Thomas: ‘Lucy and Colin’ 186 Tillyard, E. M. W. 24 Toda, Fernando 24 topography 14, 161–62, 171, 192 Train, Joseph 12 Tulloch, Graham 3, 45, 46, 54n61, 59, 67, 121, 137, 169, 197n58, 199n104

234  General Index Turbervile, George: The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting 17, 167 Turner, Sir James: Memoirs 168; Pallas Armata 168 Tyrwhitt, Thomas 73, 132 Tysdahl, Bjorn 54n70 Ubeda, Francisco López de 80 Valentine and Orson 183 Verrall, A. E. 24 Verstegan, Richard: Restitution Of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities 18 Vertot, Abbé René Aubert, Abbé de: The History of the Knights of Malta 193 Virgil 58, 141–44, 155n39, 155n40, 160; The Aeneid 78, 142–44, 158; Eclogues 69, 77, 141, 143; Georgics 63, 143, 175 Voet, Johannes: Commentarius ad Pandectas 11 Vulgate 120, 121, 177 Wager, William: The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art 74 Waldron, George: A Description of the Isle of Man 178 Walker, Helen 49, 50 Walker, Patrick: Six Saints of the Covenant 17, 162, 165 Waller, Edmund 78, 108 Walpole, Horace 24; The Mysterious Mother 87–88 Walsh, William: ‘The Despairing Lover’ 78 Walton, Isaac: The Compleat Angler 80 ‘Waly waly, love be bonny’ 100 Wardlaw, Elizabeth: Hardyknute 81, 158

Warton, Thomas: ‘The Crusade’ 187; ‘Ode on the Approach of Summer 77; ‘The Progress of Discontent’ 77 Watson, Nicola J. 92–93, 126, 154n14, 198n92 Watts, Isaac 108, 109 Weber, Henry: Tales of the East (ed.) 141, 183, 186 Webster, John: The White Devil 108 Welsh, Alexander 24, 201 Westminster Review 46 Whitlock, Richard: Zōotomia 171 Whole Prophecies of Scotland, etc. 193 Whyte, Christopher 154n21 Wilkes, John 87 Wilkie, David 43 Wilkie, William: The Epigoniad 109 Wilson, A. N. 44, 171 Wilson, W. E. 20n14 Wodrow, Robert: The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland 17, 162 Wordsworth, Jonathan 156n51 Wordsworth, William 14, 42, 43, 45, 84, 141, 150, 155n39, 189; Ecclesiastical Sonnets 101–02, 185; ‘The Fountain’ 72, 150, 160; ‘Hart-Leap Well’ 102, 150; ‘Poems on the Naming of Places IV’ 102; ‘Rob Roy’s Grave’ 110; ‘Scene on the Lake of Brientz’ 78; ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’ 102; ‘Stepping Westward’ 26; ‘Strange fits of passion have I known’ 72, 150; ‘The Idiot Boy’ 150; ‘The Thorn’ 150 Wraxall, Nathaniel William: The History of France 181 Young, Edward: Night Thoughts 88