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which the foremost prima donnas were once wont to shine, has been dramatised with some success within many readers' recollection.

The legend of Montrose's wars, which formed the second portion of the third series called Tales of My Landlord, seems to have been originally undertaken to give a picture of a Highland feud, set in a frame put together from the author's

studies of the great Marquis
of Montrose's campaigns
against the Covenanters and
of his rivalry with the chief
of the Campbells. But,
having taken occasion to
introduce a Scottish soldier
of fortune serving with
Montrose, this individual so
gained upon his affections,
as to become virtually the
chief personage of the story.

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ON BERWICKSHIRE COAST

So it came about that

it is not so much the great Marquis, or the Children of the Mist, that one thinks of when reading The Legend of Montrose as the old mercenary captain, with his tales of the German wars and his much-prized horse (named Gustavus after the Protestant hero), who contrives to defeat the treacherous Argyll in his own dungeon at Inverary and to substitute the person of the wily lord of the castle for that of his prisoners. For this delightful creation Scott admits having taken a hint from a pre

ceding master of fiction; but the great Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket is in substance all his own. He was compounded partly from what he had read of the exploits recorded by themselves of two seventeenthcentury soldiers of fortune (who, like Montrose's Major, had some pretensions to scholarship, which they were by no means loath to exhibit), but partly also from personal recollections of a veteran whom he had met in his own boyhood, and who actually supplied the surname of the fictitious character. Together he is a perfect type of the "wandering Scot" of a bygone age, daring and yet prudent, undaunted, garrulous, with a touch of letters and a flavour of rascality; unscrupulous in general, but not without some queer notions of fidelity.

Although written in a time of sickness and pain, these tales show nothing of weakness or imperfection. Scott must have been pleased to hear from that veteran author, "The Man of Feeling," that the first reading of them had caused him to forget the sufferings of a sick-bed, and that the second, undertaken in more favourable circumstances, had only served to confirm his previous pleasant impression. We have James Ballantyne's authority for the very singular statement that when the printed volume containing The Bride of Lammermoor was put into its writer's hands, he did not recollect "one single incident, character, or conversation" in it, though he still retained in his mind the materials out of which he had constructed it. On reading it, he said that the worst of it made him laugh, and he trusted the good

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natured public would not be less indulgent. That they were by no means tired of these Northern romances is proved by the attempt made soon afterwards to put into circulation a spurious fourth series of Tales of My Landlord. Constable, who had just purchased all his copyrights, and the Ballantynes, now wanted Scott to drop the mask and stop the publication; but the real author preferred to let the public form their own judgment. He was justified by the complete collapse of the fraudulent venture. The genuine Fourth Series did not appear till 1831, and formed the last of the Waverley

Novels.

The chief cause of the distress of mind alluded to by Scott himself in connection with The Bride and The Legend was the death of his old chieftain and friend, Charles, Duke of Buccleuch, which affected him so greatly as to bring about a relapse. Before Ivanhoe appeared at the end of the year, he had lost also an uncle, an aunt, his neighbour Lord Somerville, and, above all, that mother from whom he had drawn the principal studies for his pictures of the past. The old lady had, he recalled, often spoken with one who well remembered the battle of Dunbar and Cromwell's entry into Edinburgh; and she was not the kind of person who would neglect to communicate such experiences to a son who lived so much of his own life in bygone days. Scott was also not a little troubled by the disturbed state of the country, which he, amongst others, looked upon

as on the brink of civil war. He agreed to accept the colonelcy of a regiment of Border sharpshooters, and also attacked the disaffected with literary weapons, writing three articles called "The Visionary" for a weekly paper. Their authorship appears to have been guessed, for the Sheriff received a letter reminding him of the fate of Kotzebue, the German dramatist, who had recently been assassinated. Scott was not the man to hold his hand for such things. "They may fright boys with bugs, for I fear none," he quotes from the great dramatist whose words he had ever in his mouth.

It was little less than extraordinary that amid all these distractions-and we must not forget the usual supply of visitors to Abbotsford, who included this autumn Leopold, afterwards King of the Belgians—he should have produced one of the most successful of all his works, certainly the most popular in England. Ivanhoe was ultimately, by the publisher's wish, announced as by the author of Waverley; but the original idea was to have foisted it upon the public as the production of an Englishman. In a Dedicatory Epistle Laurence Templeton played the part of "Jedediah Cleishbotham" in Tales of My Landlord. It quite

succeeded in giving the impression of novelty which was aimed at, and except for one or two words here and there might pass as the production of a Southron. In this romance we are for the first time in one of Scott's novels entirely in England. Also, in spite of the

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