Antiquary' should have been duly considered. Scott must have known from the first who Lovel was to turn out to be, and must have recognised in the hapless bride of Lord Glenallan the object of the Antiquary's solitary and unfortunate passion. To introduce another Wandering Heir immediately after the Harry Bertram of 'Guy Mannering' was rather audacious. But that old favourite, the Lost Heir, is nearly certain to be popular. For the Antiquary's immortal sorrow Scott had a model in his own experience. 'What a romance to tell!—and told, I fear, it will one day be. And then my three years of dreaming and my two years of wakening will be chronicled doubtless. But the dead will feel no pain.' The dead, as Aristotle says, if they care for such things at all, care no more than we do for what has passed in a dream.
The general sketch probably began to take full shape about the last day of 1815. On December 29 Scott wrote to Ballantyne:—
DEAR JAMES,—
In 'The Antiquary' Scott had a subject thoroughly to his mind. He had been an antiquary from his childhood. His earliest pence had been devoted to that collection of printed ballads which is still at Abbotsford. These he mentions in the unfinished fragment of his 'Reliquiae Trotcosienses,' in much the same words as in his manuscript note on one of the seven volumes.
'This little collection of Stall tracts and ballads was formed by me, when a boy, from the baskets of the travelling pedlars. Until put into its present decent binding it had such charms for the servants that it was repeatedly, and with difficulty, recovered from their clutches. It contains most of the pieces that were popular about thirty years since, and, I dare say, many that could not now be procured for any price (1810).'
'Walter had soon begun to gather out-of-the-way things of all sorts. He had more books than shelves [sic]; a small painted cabinet with Scotch and Roman coins in it, and so forth. A claymore and Lochaber axe, given him by old Invernahyle, mounted guard on a little print of Prince Charlie; and Broughton's Saucer was hooked up on the wall below it.' He had entered literature through the ruined gateway of archleology, in the 'Border Minstrelsy,' and his last project was an edition of Perrault's 'Contes de Ma Mere l'Oie.' As pleasant to him as the purchase of new lands like Turn Again, bought dearly, as in Monkbarns's case, from 'bonnet lauds,' was a fresh acquisition of an old book or of old armour. Yet, with all his enthusiasm, he did not please the antiquaries of his own day. George Chalmers, in Constable's 'Life and Correspondence' (i. 431), sneers at his want of learning. 'His notes are loose and unlearned, as they generally are.' Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, his friend in life, disported himself in jealous and ribald mockery of Scott's archaeological knowledge, when Scott was dead. In a letter of the enigmatic Thomas Allen, or James Stuart Hay, father of John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart, this mysterious person avers that he never knew Scott's opinion to be held as of any value by antiquaries (1829). They probably missed in him 'a sort of pettifogging intimacy with dates, names, and trifling matters of fact,—a tiresome and frivolous accuracy of memory' which Sir Arthur Wardour reproves in Monkbarns. Scott, in brief, was not as Dry-as-dust; all the dead bones that he touches come to life. He was as great an archeologist as a poet can be, and, with Virgil, was the greatest antiquary among poets. Like Monkbarns, he was not incapable of being beguiled. As Oldbuck bought the bodle from the pedlar at the price of a rare coin, so Scott took Surtees's 'Barthram's Dirge,' and his Latin legend of the tourney with the spectre knight, for genuine antiquities. No Edie Ochiltree ever revealed to him the truth about these forgeries, and the spectre knight, with the ballad of 'Anthony Featherstonhaugh,' hold their own in 'Marmion,' to assure the world that this antiquary was gullible when the sleight was practised by a friend. 'Non est tanti,' he would have said, had he learned the truth; for he was ever conscious of the humorous side of the study of the mouldering past. 'I do not know anything which relieves the mind so much from the sullens as a trifling discourse about antiquarian oldwomanries. It is like knitting a stocking,—diverting the mind without occupying it.' ('Journal,' March 9, 1828).
Begun about Jan. 1, 1816, 'The Antiquary' was published before May 16, 1816, when Scott writes to say that he has sent Mr. Morritt the novel 'some time since.' 'It is not so interesting as its predecessors; the period does not admit of so much romantic situation. But it has been more fortunate than any of them in the sale, for six thousand went off in the first six days, and it is now at press again.' The Preface of the first edition ends with the melancholy statement that the author 'takes his respectful leave, as one who is not likely again to solicit favour.' Apparently Scott had already determined not to announce his next novels ('The Black Dwarf' and 'Old Mortality') as 'by the Author of Waverley.' Mr. Constable, in the biography of his father, says (iii. 84): 'Even before the publication of 'The Antiquary,' John Ballantyne had been impowered by the Author to negotiate with Mr. Murray and Mr. Blackwood for the first series of the 'Tales of my Landlord.'' The note of withdrawal from the stage, in the first edition of 'The Antiquary,' was probably only a part of another experiment on public sagacity. As Lockhart says, Mr. Murray and Mr. Blackwood thought that the consequent absence of the Author of 'Waverley's' name from the 'Tales of my Landlord' would 'check very much the first success of the book;' but they risked this, 'to disturb Constable's tenure.'
Scott's temporary desertion of Constable in the 'Tales of my Landlord' may have had various motives. There was a slight grudge against Constable, born of some complications of the Ballantynes' affairs. Perhaps the mere amusement of the experiment on public sagacity was one of the more powerful reasons for the change. In our day Lord Lytton and Mr. Trollope made similar trials of their popularity when anonymous, the former author with the greater success. The idea of these masquerades and veils of the incognito appears to have bewitched Constable. William Godwin was writing for him his novel 'Mandeville,' and Godwin had obviously been counselled to try a disguise. He says (Jan. 30, 1816) 'I have amused my imagination a thousand times since last we parted with the masquerade you devised for me. The world is full of wonder. An old favourite is always reviewed with coldness. . . . 'Pooh,' they say; 'Godwin has worn his pen to the stump!' . . . But let me once be equipped with a significant mask and an unknown character from your masquerade shop, and admitted to figure in with the 'Last Minstrel,' the 'Lady of the Lake,' and 'Guy Mannering' in the Scottish carnival, Gods! how the boys and girls will admire me! 'Here is a new wonder!' they will say. 'Ah, this is something like! Here is Godwin beaten on his own ground. . . Here is for once a Scottish writer that they cannot say has anything of the Scotchman about him.''
However, Mr. Godwin did not don the mask and domino. 'Mandeville' came out about the same time as 'Rob Roy;' but the 'craziness of the public' for the Author of 'Waverley' was not changed into a passion for the father- in-law of Shelley.
''The Antiquary,' after a little pause of hesitation, attained popularity not inferior to 'Guy Mannering,' and though the author appears for a moment to have shared the doubts which he read in the countenance of James Ballantyne, it certainly was, in the sequel, his chief favourite among all his novels.''
As Scott said to Terry, 'If a man will paint from nature, he will be likely to amuse those who are daily looking at it.' The years which saw the first appearance of 'Guy Mannering' also witnessed that of 'Emma.' By the singular chance, or law, which links great authors closely in time, giving us novelists in pairs, Miss Austen was 'drawing from nature' at the very moment when Scott was wedding nature with romance. How generously and
