me wander about the place, without entering the house; and I
spent a most melancholy hour in the garden and in pacing up and down the
terrace overlooking the Tweed side. The place was no longer inhabited at
all; my ringing at the gate had brought, after much delay, a servant
from Mr. Hope's new residence, built at some distance from Scott's
house, and from her I learned that the proprietor of Abbotsford had
withdrawn to the house he had erected for himself, leaving the poet's
dwelling exclusively as a place of pilgrimage for travelers and
strangers, with not even a servant residing under its roof. The house
abandoned to curious wayfarers; the sons and daughters, the grandson and
granddaughter, every member of the founder's family dead; Mr. Hope
remarried to a lady of the house of Arundel, and living in a
semi-monastic seclusion in a house walled off from the tourist-haunted
shrine of the great man whose memory alone was left to inhabit it,--all
these circumstances filled me with indescribable sadness as I paced up
and down in the gloaming, and thought of the strange passion for
founding here a family of the old Border type which had obfuscated the
keen, clear brain of Walter Scott, made his wonderful gifts subservient
to the most futile object of ambition, driven him to the verge of
disgrace and bankruptcy, embittered the evening of his laborious and
glorious career, and finally ended in this,--the utter extinction of the
name he had illustrated and the family he had hoped to found. And while
his noble works remain to make his memory ever loved and honored, this
_Brummagem_ mediaeval mansion, this mock feudal castle with its imitation
baronial hall (upon a diminutive scale) hung round with suits of armor,
testifies to the utter perversity of good sense and good taste resulting
from this one mental infirmity, this craving to be a Border chieftain of
the sixteenth century instead of an Edinburgh lawyer of the nineteenth,
and his preference for the distinction of a petty landholder to that of
the foremost genius of his age. Mr. Combe, in speaking of this feudal
insanity of Scott and the piteous havoc it made of his life, told me
that at one time he and Ballantyne, with whom he had entered into
partnership, were staving off imminent ruin by indorsing and accepting
each other's bills, and carried on that process to the extremest verge
compatible with honesty. What a history of astounding success and utter
failure!