MEMORIES OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.* JAMES SKENE, the laird of

Rubislaw, near Aberdeen, was of all Sir Walter's friends the one who most realised his ideal of companionship. Clerk and Erskine were perhaps

deeper in his confidence, but they did not share his tastes, as Skene did. Hence the recollections, which Mr. Basil Thomson has edited from his great-grandfather's papers, have the value of a portrait at close quarters, drawn by one who had the chance of seeing his hero in all moods and situations. Scott had the gift of charming the most casual acquaintance ; but he had another which is rarely conjoined with it, the power of deepening year by year the affection of his intimates. Skene was one of those elaborately cultivated Scotsmen who flourished at the beginning of last century. He was a patron of all the arts, and for painting had a notable talent of his own. He loved travel, and antiquities, and learned societies.

But he was also a sportsman and country gentleman, and was as happy with Tom Pnrdie playing a salmon in Tweed as sitting in Edinburgh with the Royal Society. He was a man of considerable ability, and possessed a genius for friendship.

In the crisis of his life Sir Walter turned to him first, and to him he wrote what seems to have been his last letter. From these recollections we get a simple and yet most vivid picture of one of the noblest of human spirits, the jottings of a friend who wished to preserve his recollections of an intimacy which to him stood out as the greatest fact in his life.

Skene first met Scott in 1794, when he had returned from Germany to study for the Scots Bar. His knowledge of the German language was useful to Sir Walter, who . was beginning to experiment in ballad translation, and the two men had another bond in their passion for long walks and violent exercise. They served together in the Volunteer Cavalry, and a delightful letter to Lockhart gives Skene's reminiscences of the " high-jinks " of that noted body. Scott was then composing Marmian, and when they assembled on the drill-ground at Portobello Sands at five o'clock in the morning, "Sir Waiter was often seen dodging up and down -on'his black gelding at the very edge of the sea in complete abstraction." Then followed visits to Ashestiel, where they used to "burn the water" for salmon, and long rambles over the Yarrow and Ettrick hills, where the friends were often mired in bogs and half drowned in torrents. It was the heyday of Scott's life. His health and spirits were at their best ; litera- ture was still a hobby rather than a profession ; and the cottage

at Ashestiel, unlike Abbotsford, carried no cares with it. There are many interesting notes in the letters to Skene. In one

.Scott discusses the average author's profits from a book, and works them out at about half-a-guinea upon three guineas in the case of an expensive work by a new writer. Sixteen and two-thirds per cent. is not a bad proportion, as we should reckon nowadays. When the novels began, Skene did not at first guess the authorship of Waverley, but Guy Mannering -convinced him. Mr. Thomson says that he was not admitted to the secret of the authorship, but that must have come later, for Lockhart includes his name in the list of the few who had been told outside Sir Walter's own family. Skene recounts an amusing incident in this connexion. He found Scott one day engaged with a visitor, who turned out to be a cousin on a curious errand,—to beg Sir Walter to challenge him to a duel. He declared that, believing Scott to be the author of the novels, he had come to acknowledge having offered him an unpardonable affront,—to wit, declaring that he himself was the author. He could not feel at ease, he said, till he had received Sir Walter's fire.

Of Scott's kindliness and sympathy Skene is never tired of telling. He once wrote a sermon for a timid "probationer," a form of help which few men would be prepared to give. His anger was slow to kindle, and short-lived :-

"He was remarkably bold and intrepid, and would, there is little doubt, have proved under exciting circumstances a most determined and dangerous antagonist as a man, but the passion of anger was unnatural to him, and it surrendered its momentary

• The Skene Papers: Memories of Sir Walter Scott. By James Skene. Edited by Basil Thomson. London: John Murray. [7s. 6d. net.] hold on his mind, giving place to kindness upon the very first opportunity. He always volunteered some jocular excuse for any waywardness or inconvenience to which any one had subjected him, with two exceptions, which, though apparently of but trifling import, were the only occurrences under which I observed him to testify impatience ; namely, if any one had inadvertently used his pen, or if he found a book carelessly treated."

Skene has many notes, too, of Sir Walter's absent-minded- ness during his great period of production. He once went to

Jedburgh to visit an aged aunt, and, forgetting that she had changed her address, broke in upon an ancient stranger and saluted her with the warmest affection. Curiously enough for one who took so much interest in his surroundings, he never noticed a change in decoration or furniture. Skene tells the story of how the old carved stones of the Tolbooth were procured for Abbotsford. There is a sentence in a letter from Scott which gives us a glimpse into the simplicity of life which lay behind all the apparent elaboration of Abbotsford.

"My carts are to be in town with lambs for the market on Wednesday. Would it not be possible to get the stones down so as to return with the said carts on Thursday " There are, of course, many notes on the novels, chiefly with regard to their use of real incidents and places. Scott disclaims having drawn the castle of Tillietudlem from Craignethan ; he never thought of it till Skene suggested it. The adventure with the seals in The Antiquary actually happened to Skene near Dunottar. We learn, too, that the original of Dugald Dalgetty was a certain General Martin Skene, who com- manded the Dutch army at the siege of Namur.

When the crash came Skene was the first man to whom

Sir Walter turned. The account of the meeting is one which we dare not spoil by quotation. It is well worth reading to show how one good man can bear adversity and another help

to lighten it. The tragedy of Scott's career is summed up in the cry :—

" But woe's me ! I much mistrust my vigour, for the best of my energies are already expended. You have seen, my dear Skene, the Roman coursers urged to their speed by a loaded spur attached to their backs to whet the rusted mettle of their age—aye, it is a leaden spur indeed, and it goads hard."

During these later years Skene was much at Abbotsford, and it was in his company that Scott paid his last visit to Smail- holm, the home of his childhood. The letters from Malta, written by accident on the back of manuscript, show how

on that hopeless quest for health the old intellectual vitality struggled against the growing bodily weakness. Skene was the friend the dying man asked for in one of the lucid intervals in his last illness, and in the Memories we have a

touching account of the funeral, when the people of Melrose lined the streets, and the old and blind waited in chairs to pay their last respects to the " Shirra." "How poignantly Skene felt the loss," Mr. Thomson tells us, "may be judged

by the fact, unrecorded in his minute account of the funeral, that he fell down in a fainting fit beside the open grave at Dryburgh." Scott had many friends nearer his own intel- lectual level, like Erskine and Morritt, but he had no better comrade than the laird of Rubislaw, and no man seems to have had more of his affections. Mr. Thomson tells a curious tale, which shows how deep a hold the friendship had taken of Skene's life. He survived Sir Walter by thirty-three years, and when he was over ninety his daughter found him one autumn evening "almost transfigured by an expression of the most radiant delight" :—

" The moment I came in," she wrote, "he told me that he had just experienced an inexpressible joy; he had just seen dear Scott again ! He had walked into the room quite suddenly, and told him that he had come from a very long distance to visit him. Then my father described his unchanged appearance, and how he had sat down on the other side of the hearth. 'It has been such a joyful meeting, but dear Scott did not stay very long.' This account was so detailed and clear, that I almost felt as if I had myself seen what he described."