Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody

XXIII

The Baron explains the mysterious circumstances of his affair with his third cousin, Sir Hew Halbert. – “Waverley,” chap. xiv.

Son Edward, – Touching my quarrel with Sir Hew Halbert, anent which I told you no more than that it was “settled in a fitting manner,” you have long teased me for an ampler explanation. This I have withheld, as conceiving that it tended rather to vain quolibets and jesting, than to that respect in which the duello, or single combat, should be regarded by gentlemen of name and coat armour. But Sir Hew being dead, and buried with his fathers, the matter may be broached as among friends and persons of honour. The ground of our dispute, as ye know, was an unthinking scoff of Sir Hew’s, he being my own third cousin by the mother’s side, Anderson of Ettrick Hall having intermarried, about the time of the Solemn League and Covenant, with Anderson of Tushielaw, both of which houses are connected with the Halberts of Dinniewuddie and with the Bradwardines. But stemmata quid faciunt? Sir Hew, being a young man, and the maut, as the vulgar say, above the meal, after a funeral of one of our kin in the Cathedral Kirkyard of St. Andrews, we met at Glass’s Inn, where, in the presence of many gentlemen, occurred our unfortunate dissension.

We encountered betimes next morning, on a secluded spot of the sands hard by the town, at the Eden-mouth. 24 The weapons were pistols, Sir Hew, by a slight passing infirmity, being disabled from the use of the sword. Inchgrabbit was my second, and Strathtyrum did the same office for my kinsman, Sir Hew. The pistols being charged and primed, and we aligned forenent each other at the convenient distance of twelve paces, the word was given to fire, and both weapons having been discharged, and the smoke having cleared away, Sir Hew was discovered fallen to the ground, procumbus humi, and exanimate. The blood was flowing freely from a face-wound, and my unhappy kinsman was senseless. At this moment we heard a voice, as of one clamantis in eremo, cry “Fore!” to which paying no heed in the natural agitation of our spirits, we hurried to lift my fallen opponent and examine his wound. Upon a closer search it proved to be no shot-wound, but a mere clour, or bruise, whereof the reason was now apparent, he having been struck by the ball of a golfer (from us concealed by the dunes, or bunkers, of sand) and not by the discharge of my weapon. At this moment a plebeian fellow appeared with his arma campestria, or clubs, cleeks, irons, and the like, under his arm, who, without paying any attention to our situation, struck the ball wherewith he had felled my kinsman in the direction of the hole. Reflection directed us to the conclusion that both pistols had missed their aim, and that Sir Hew had fallen beneath a chance blow from this fellow’s golf-ball. But as my kinsman was still hors de combat, and incapable of further action, being unwitting, too, of the real cause of his disaster, Inchgrabbit and Strathtyrum, in their discretion as seconds, or belli judices, deemed it better that we should keep a still sough, and that Sir Hew should never be informed concerning the cause of his discomfiture. This resolution we kept, and Sir Hew wore, till the day of his late lamented decease, a bullet among the seals of his watch, he being persuaded by Strathtyrum that it had been extracted from his brain-pan, which certainly was of the thickest. But this was all a bam, or bite, among young men, and a splore to laugh over by our three selves, nor would I have it to go abroad now that Sir Hew is dead, as being prejudicial to the memory of a worthy man, and an honourable family connected with our own. Wherefore I pray you keep a still sough hereanent, as you love me, who remain – Your loving good father,

APPENDIX

Note on Letter of Mr. Surtees to Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, p. 64.

No literary forgeries were ever much better done than the sham ballads which Surtees of Mainsforth imposed on Sir Walter Scott. The poems were spirited and good of their kind; and though we wonder now that some of them could take in an expert, it is by no means assured that we are even to-day acquainted with the whole of Surtees’ frauds. Why a man otherwise honourable, kindly, charitable, and learned, exercised his ingenuity so cruelly upon a trusting correspondent and a staunch friend, it is hardly possible to guess. The biographers of Surtees maintain that he wanted to try his skill on Scott, then only known to him by correspondence; and that, having succeeded, he was afraid to risk Scott’s friendship by a confession. This is plausible; and if good may come out of evil, we may remember that two picturesque parts of “Marmion” are due to one confessed and another certain supercherie of Surtees. It cannot be said in his defence that he had no conception of the mischief of literary frauds; in more than one passage of his correspondence he mentions Ritson’s detestation of these practices. “To literary imposition, as tending to obscure the path of inquiry, Ritson gave no quarter,” says this arch literary impostor.

A brief account of Surtees’ labour in the field of sham ballad writing may be fresh to many people who merely know him as the real author of “Barthram’s Dirge” and of “The Slaying of Anthony Featherstonhaugh.” In an undated letter of 1806, Scott, writing from Ashestiel, thanks Surtees for his “obliging communications.” Surtees manifestly began the correspondence, being attracted by the “Border Minstrelsy.” Thus it appears that Surtees did not forge “Hobbie Noble” in the first edition of the “Minstrelsy”; for he makes some suggestions as to the “Earl of Whitfield,” dreaded by the hero of that ballad, which Scott had already published. But he was already deceiving Scott, who writes to him about “Ralph Eure,” or “Lord Eure,” and about a “Goth, who melted Lord Eure’s gold chain.” This Lord Eure is doubtless the “Lord Eurie” of the ballad in the later editions of the “Border Minstrelsy,” a ballad actually composed by Surtees. That wily person immediately sent Scott a ballad on “The Feud between the Ridleys and Featherstones,” in which Scott believed to the day of his death. He introduced it in “Marmion.”

In his note (“Border Minstrelsy,” second edition, 1808, p. xxi.) Scott says the ballad was taken down from an old woman’s recitation at the Alston Moor lead-mines “by the agent there,” and sent by him to Surtees. Consequently, when Surtees saw “Marmion” in print he had to ask Scott not to print “the agent,” as he does not know even the name of Colonel Beaumont’s chief agent there, but “an agent.” Thus he hedged himself from a not impossible disclaimer by the agent at the mines.

Readers of “Marmion” will remember how

This legend is more of Surtees’ fun. “The most singular tale of this kind,” says Sir Walter, “is contained in an extract communicated to me by my friend Mr. Surtees, of Mainsforth, who copied it from a MS. note in a copy of Burthogge “On the Nature of Spirits, 1694, 8vo,” which had been the property of the late Mr. Gill. It was not in Mr. Gill’s own hand: but probably an hundred years older, and was said to be “E libro Convent. Dunelm. per T. C. extract.;” this T. C. being Thomas Cradocke, Esq. Scott adds, that the passage, which he gives in the Latin, suggested the introduction of the tourney with the Fairy Knight in “Marmion.” Well, where is Cradocke’s extract? The original was “lost” before Surtees sent his “copy” to Sir Walter. “The notes had been carelessly or injudiciously shaken out of the book.” Surtees adds, another editor confirms it, that no such story exists in any MS. of the Dean and Chapter of Durham. No doubt he invented the whole story, and wrote it himself in mediæval Latin.

Not content with two “whoppers,” as Mr. Jo Gargery might call them, Surtees goes on to invent a perfectly incredible heraldic bearing. He found it in a MS. note in the “Gwillim’s Heraldry” of Mr. Gyll or Gill – the name is written both ways. “He beareth per pale or and arg., over all a spectre passant, shrouded sable” – “he” being Newton, of Beverley, in Yorkshire. Sir Walter actually swallowed this amazing fib, and alludes to it in “Rob Roy” (1818). But Mr. Raine, the editor of Surtees’ Life, inherited or bought his copy of Gwillim, that of Mr. Gill or Gyll; “and I find in it no trace of such an entry.” “Lord Derwentwater’s Good-Night” is probably entirely by Surtees. “A friend of Mr. Taylor’s” gave him a Tynedale ballad, “Hey, Willy Ridley, winna you stay?” which is also “aut Diabolus aut Robertus.” As to “Barthram’s Dirge,” “from Ann Douglas, a withered crone who weeds my garden,” copies with various tentative verses in Surtees’ hand have been found. Oddly enough, Sir Walter had once discovered a small sepulchral cross, upset, in Liddesdale, near the “Nine Stane Rig;” and this probably made him more easily deceived. Surtees very cleverly put some lines, which could not have been original, in brackets, as his own attempt to fill up lacunæ. Such are

Any one reading the piece would say, “It must be genuine, for the confessed interpolations are not in the ballad style, which the interpolator, therefore, could not write.” An attempt which Surtees made when composing the song, and which he wisely rejected, could not have failed to excite Scott’s suspicions. It ran —

Whether Surtees’ “Brown Man of the Muirs,” to which Scott also gave a place in his own poetry, was a true legend or not, the reader may decide for himself.

Concerning another ballad in the “Minstrelsy” – “Auld Maitland” – Professor Child has expressed a suspicion which most readers feel. What Scott told Ellis about it (Autumn, 1802) was, that he got it in the Forest, “copied down from the recitation of an old shepherd by a country farmer.” Who was the farmer? Will Laidlaw had employed James Hogg, as shepherd. Hogg’s mother chanted “Auld Maitland.” Hogg first met Scott in the summer of 1801. The shepherd had already seen the first volume of the “Minstrelsy.” Did he, thereupon, write “Auld Maitland,” teach his mother it, and induce Laidlaw to take it down from her recitation? The old lady said she got it from Andrew Moir, who had it “frae auld Baby Mettlin, who was said to have been another nor a gude ane.” But we have Hogg’s own statement that “aiblins ma gran’-mither was an unco leear,” and this quality may have been hereditary. On the other side, Hogg could hardly have held his tongue about the forgery, if forgery it was, when he wrote his “Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott” (1834). The whole investigation is a little depressing, and makes one very shy of unauthenticated ballads.

1

Who knows what may happen? I may die before he sees the light; so I will add among my friends Skalagrim Lamb’s-tail.

2

Can Mrs. Gamp mean ‘dial’?

3

1887.

4

In his familiar correspondence, it will be observed, Herodotus does not trouble himself to maintain the dignity of history.

5

Mr. Flinders Petrie has just discovered and sent to Mr. Holly, of Trinity, Cambridge, the well-known traveller, a wall-painting of a beautiful woman, excavated by the Egypt Exploration Society, from the ruined site of the Temple of Aphrodite in Naucratis. Mr. Holly, in an affecting letter to the Academy, states that he recognises in this picture “an admirable though somewhat archaic portrait of She.” There can thus be little or no doubt that She was Rhodopis, and therefore several hundred years older than she said. But few will blame her for being anxious not to claim her full age.

This unexpected revelation appears to throw light on some fascinating peculiarities in the behaviour of She.

6

The great intimacy between Mrs. Proudie and Mrs. Quiverful, indicated by Mrs. Proudie’s use of the Bishop’s Christian name – and that abbreviated – has amazed the discoverer and editor of her correspondence.

7

This signature of Mrs. Proudie’s is so unusual an assumption of the episcopal style, that it might well cast a doubt on the authenticity of her letter. But experts pronounce it genuine. “Barnum,” of course, is “Baronum Castrum,” the rather odd Roman name of Barchester.

8

It has been seen that Mrs. Quiverful did not obey this injunction.

9

This man was well known to Sir Walter Scott, who speaks of his curious habits in an unpublished manuscript.

10

Mr. Forth, we are sure, is quite wrong, and none of the scholars he quotes has said anything of the kind.

11

“He” clearly means, not Addison, but Professor Forth, the lady’s husband.

12

It was not Asiatics, but Aztecs; not Pittites, but Hittites! Woman cares little for these studies! – A.L.

13

The editor has no doubt that some one was – Miss Watson. Cf. ‘Belinda.’

14

Owing to the sudden decease of the Dean in well-known and melancholy circumstances, this letter was not delivered.

15

Alas, not wisely! But any careful reader of “The Silence of Dean Maitland” will see that the Baby was an anachronism. – Ed.

16

This appears to have been a favourite remark of Mr. Skimpole’s. It will be noticed that, quite without intending it, Mr. Skimpole was the founder of our New Cyrenaic School.

17

Mr. Skimpole’s recollections of classical ritual are a little mixed hereabouts. He refers to Mr. Honeyman’s projected union with the widow of Mr. Bromley, the famous hatter.

18

Colonel Newcome, indeed.

19

Non, Monsieur, je ne cite ni “Woodsworth” ni “le vieux Williams.”

20

Mr. Potts ought to have consulted the edition of 1833, where he would have found the verse as quoted by Mr. Gandish.

21

And a nice mixture it must have been! – A. L.

22

The wooden bed fastened in an ox-waggon.

23

Mr. Quatermain has just said that the donga was filled by a roaring torrent. Is there not some inconsistency here?

24

At the High Hole, indeed. – A. L.