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THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL
THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL SIR WALTER SCOTT INTRODUCTION
But why should lordlings all our praise engross?
Rise honest man and sing the Man of Ross.
Pope
Having in the tale of the Heart of Mid-Lothian succeeded in some
degree in awakening an interest in behalf of one devoid of those
accomplishments which belong to a heroine almost by right I was next
tempted to choose a hero upon the same unpromising plan; and as worth
of character goodness of heart and rectitude of principle were
necessary to one who laid no claim to high birth romantic
sensibility or any of the usual accomplishments of those who strut
through the pages of this sort of composition I made free with the
name of a person who has left the most magnificent proofs of his
benevolence and charity that the capital of Scotland has to display.
To the Scottish reader little more need be said than that the man
alluded to is George Heriot. But for those south of the Tweed it may
be necessary to add that the person so named was a wealthy citizen of
Edinburgh and the King's goldsmith who followed James to the English
capital and was so successful in his profession as to die in 1624
extremely wealthy for that period. He had no children; and after
making a full provision for such relations as might have claims upon
him he left the residue of his fortune to establish an hospital in
which the sons of Edinburgh freemen are gratuitously brought up and
educated for the station to which their talents may recommend them
and are finally enabled to enter life under respectable auspices. The
hospital in which this charity is maintained is a noble quadrangle of
the Gothic order and as ornamental to the city as a building as the
manner in which the youths are provided for and educated renders it
useful to the community as an institution. To the honour of those who
have the management (the Magistrates and Clergy of Edinburgh) the
funds of the Hospital have increased so much under their care that it
now supports and educates one hundred and thirty youths annually many
of whom have done honour to their country in different situations.
The founder of such a charity as this may be reasonably supposed to
have walked through life with a steady pace and an observant eye
neglecting no opportunity of assisting those who were not possessed of
the experience necessary for their own guidance. In supposing his
efforts directed to the benefit of a young nobleman misguided by the
aristocratic haughtiness of his own time and the prevailing tone of
selfish luxury which seems more peculiar to ours as well as the
seductions of pleasure which are predominant in all some amusement
or even some advantage might I thought be derived from the manner
in which I might bring the exertions of this civic Mentor to bear in
his pupil's behalf. I am I own no great believer in the moral
utility to be derived from fictitious compositions; yet if in any
case a word spoken in season may be of advantage to a young person it
must surely be when it calls upon him to attend to the voice of
principle and self-denial instead of that of precipitate passion. I
could not indeed hope or expect to represent my prudent and
benevolent citizen in a point of view so interesting as that of the
peasant girl who nobly sacrificed her family affections to the
integrity of her moral character. Still however something I hoped
might be done not altogether unworthy the fame which George Heriot has
secured by the lasting benefits he has bestowed on his country.
It appeared likely that out of this simple plot I might weave
something attractive; because the reign of James I. in which George
Heriot flourished gave unbounded scope to invention in the fable
while at the same time it afforded greater variety and discrimination
of character than could with historical consistency have been
introduced if the scene had been laid a century earlier. Lady Mary
Wortley Montague has said with equal truth and taste that the most
romantic region of every country is that where the mountains unite
themselves with the plains or lowlands. For similiar reasons it may
be in like manner said that the most picturesque period of history is
that when the ancient rough and wild manners of a barbarous age are
just becoming innovated upon and contrasted by the illumination of
increased or revived learning and the instructions of renewed or
reformed religion. The strong contrast produced by the opposition of
ancient manners to those which are gradually subduing them affords
the lights and shadows necessary to give effect to a fictitious
narrative; and while such a period entitles the author to introduce
incidents of a marvellous and improbable character as arising out of
the turbulent independence and ferocity belonging to old habits of
violence still influencing the manners of a people who had been so
lately in a barbarous state; yet on the other hand the characters
and sentiments of many of the actors may with the utmost probability
be described with great variety of shading and delineation which
belongs to the newer and more improved period of which the world has
but lately received the light.
The reign of James I. of England possessed this advantage in a
peculiar degree. Some beams of chivalry although its planet had been
for some time set continued to animate and gild the horizon and
although probably no one acted precisely on its Quixotic dictates men
and women still talked the chivalrous language of Sir Philip Sydney's
Arcadia; and the ceremonial of the tilt-yard was yet exhibited though
it now only flourished as a Place de Carrousel. Here and there a high-
spirited Knight of the Bath witness the too scrupulous Lord Herbert
of Cherbury was found devoted enough to the vows he had taken to
imagine himself obliged to compel by the sword's-point a fellow-
knight or squire to restore the top-knot of ribbon which he had stolen
from a fair damsel;[Footnote: See Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs.]
but yet while men were taking each other's lives on such punctilios
of honour the hour was already arrived when Bacon was about to teach
the world that they were no longer to reason from authority to fact
but to establish truth by advancing from fact to fact till they fixed
an indisputable authority not from hypothesis but from experiment.
The state of society in the reign of James I. was also strangely
disturbed and the license of a part of the community was perpetually
giving rise to acts of blood and violence. The bravo of the Queen's
day of whom Shakspeare has given us so many varieties as Bardolph
Nym Pistol Peto and the other companions of Falstaff men who had
their humours or their particular turn of extravaganza had since
the commencement of the Low Country wars given way to a race of
sworders who used the rapier and dagger instead of the far less
dangerous sword and buckler; so that a historian says on this subject
"that private quarrels were nourished but especially between the
Scots and English; and duels in every street maintained; divers sects
and peculiar titles passed unpunished and unregarded as the sect of
the Roaring Boys Bonaventors Bravadors Quarterors and such like
being persons prodigal and of great expense who having run
themselves into debt were constrained to run next into factions to
defend themselves from danger of the law. These received countenance
from divers of the nobility; and the citizens through lasciviousness
consuming their estates it was like that the number [of these
desperadoes] would rather increase than diminish; and under these
pretences they entered into many desperate enterprizes and scarce any
durst walk in the street after nine at night."[Footnote: history of
the First Fourteen Years of King James's Reign. See Somers's Tracts
edited by Scott vol. ii. p.266.]
The same authority assures us farther that "ancient gentlemen who
had left their inheritance whole and well furnished with goods and
chattels (having thereupon kept good houses) unto their sons lived to
see part consumed in riot and excess and the rest in possibility to
be utterly lost; the holy state of matrimony made but a May-game by
which divers families had been subverted; brothel houses much
frequented and even great persons prostituting their bodies to the
intent to satisfy their lusts consumed their substance in lascivious
appetites. And of all sorts such knights and gentlemen as either
through pride or prodigality--had consumed their substance repairing
to the city and to the intent to consume their virtue also lived
dissolute lives; many of their ladies and daughters to the intent to
maintain themselves according to their dignity prostituting their
bodies in shameful manner. Ale-houses dicing-houses taverns and
places of iniquity beyond manner abounding in most places."
Nor is it only in the pages of a puritanical perhaps a satirical
writer that we find so shocking and disgusting a picture of the
coarseness of the beginning of the seventeenth century. On the
contrary in all the comedies of the age the principal character for
gaiety and wit is a young heir who has totally altered the
establishment of the father to whom he has succeeded and to use the
old simile who resembles a fountain which plays off in idleness and
extravagance the wealth which its careful parents painfully had
assembled in hidden reservoirs.
And yet while that spirit of general extravagance seemed at work over
a whole kingdom another and very different sort of men were gradually
forming the staid and resolved characters which afterwards displayed
themselves during the civil wars and powerfully regulated and
affected the character of the whole English nation until rushing
from one extreme to another they sunk in a gloomy fanaticism the
splendid traces of the reviving fine arts.
From the quotations which I have produced the selfish and disgusting
conduct of Lord Dalgarno will not perhaps appear overstrained; nor
will the scenes in Whitefriars and places of similar resort seem too
highly coloured. This indeed is far from being the case. It was in
James I.'s reign that vice first appeared affecting the better classes
in its gross and undisguised depravity. The entertainments and
amusements of Elizabeth's time had an air of that decent restraint
which became the court of a maiden sovereign; and in that earlier
period to use the words of Burke vice lost half its evil by being
deprived of all its grossness. In James's reign on the contrary the
coarsest pleasures were publicly and unlimitedly indulged since
according to Sir John Harrington the men wallowed in beastly
delights; and even ladies abandoned their delicacy and rolled about in
intoxication. After a ludicrous account of a mask in which the actors
had got drunk and behaved themselves accordingly he adds "I have
much marvelled at these strange pageantries and they do bring to my
recollection what passed of this sort in our Queen's days in which I
was sometimes an assistant and partaker: but never did I see such lack
of good order and sobriety as I have now done. The gunpowder fright is
got out of all our heads and we are going on hereabout as if the
devil was contriving every man should blow up himself by wild riot
excess and devastation of time and temperance. The great ladies do go
well masqued; and indeed it be the only show of their modesty to
conceal their countenance but alack they meet with such countenance
to uphold their strange doings that I marvel not at aught that
happens."[Footnote: Harrington's Nugae Antique vol. ii. p. 352. For
the gross debauchery of the period too much encouraged by the example
of the monarch who was in other respects neither without talent nor
a good-natured disposition see Winwood's Memorials Howell's Letters
and other Memorials of the time; but particularly consult the Private
Letters and Correspondence of Steenie _alias_ Buckingham with his
reverend Dad and Gossip King James which abound with the grossest as
well as the most childish language. The learned Mr. D'Israeli in an
attempt to vindicate the character of James has only succeeded in
obtaining for himself the character of a skilful and ingenious
advocate without much advantage to his royal client]
Such being the state of the court coarse sensuality brought along
with it its ordinary companion a brutal degree of undisguised
selfishness destructive alike of philanthropy and good breeding; both
of which in their several spheres depend upon the regard paid by
each individual to the interest as well as the feelings of others. It
is in such a time that the heartless and shameless man of wealth and
power may like the supposed Lord Dalgarno brazen out the shame of
his villainies and affect to triumph in their consequences so long
as they were personally advantageous to his own pleasures or profit.
Alsatia is elsewhere explained as a cant name for Whitefriars which
possessing certain privileges of sanctuary became for that reason a
nest of those mischievous characters who were generally obnoxious to
the law. These privileges were derived from its having been an
establishment of the Carmelites or White Friars founded says Stow
in his Survey of London by Sir Patrick Grey in 1241. Edward I. gave
them a plot of ground in Fleet Street to build their church upon. The
edifice then erected was rebuilt by Courtney Earl of Devonshire in
the reign of Edward. In the time of the Reformation the place retained
its immunities as a sanctuary and James I. confirmed and added to
them by a charter in 1608. Shadwell was the first author who made some
literary use of Whitefriars in his play of the Squire of Alsatia
which turns upon the plot of the Adelphi of Terence.
In this old play two men of fortune brothers educate two young men
(sons to the one and nephews to the other) each under his own
separate system of rigour and indulgence. The elder of the subjects of
this experiment who has been very rigidly brought up falls at once
into all the vices of the town is debauched by the cheats and bullies
of Whitefriars and in a word becomes the Squire of Alsatia. The
poet gives as the natural and congenial inhabitants of the place
such characters as the reader will find in the note. [Footnote:
"Cheatly a rascal who by reason of debts dares not stir out of
Whitefriars but there inveigles young heirs of entail and helps them
to goods and money upon great disadvantages is bound for them and
shares with them till he undoes them. A lewd impudent debauched
fellow very expert in the cant about town.
"Shamwell cousin to the Belfords who being ruined by Cheatly is
made a decoy-duck for others not daring to stir out of Alsatia where
he lives. Is bound with Cheatly for heirs and lives upon them a
dissolute debauched life.
"Captain Hackum a blockheaded bully of Alsatia a cowardly impudent
blustering fellow formerly a sergeant in Flanders who has run from
his colours and retreated into Whitefriars for a very small debt
where by the Alsatians he is dubb'd a captain marries one that lets
lodgings sells cherry-brandy and is a bawd.
"Scrapeall a hypocritical repeating praying psalm-singing precise
fellow pretending to great piety; a godly knave who joins with
Cheatly and supplies young heirs with goods and money."--Dramatis
Personae to the Squire of Alsatia SHADWELL'S Works vol. iv.] The
play as we learn from the dedication to the Earl of Dorset and
Middlesex was successful above the author's expectations "no comedy
these many years having filled the theatre so long together. And I had
the great honour" continues Shadwell "to find so many friends that
the house was never so full since it was built as upon the third day
of this play and vast numbers went away that could not be admitted."
[Footnote: Dedication to the Squire of Alsatia Shadwell's Works vol.
iv.] From the Squire of Alsatia the author derived some few hints and
learned the footing on which the bullies and thieves of the Sanctuary
stood with their neighbours the fiery young students of the Temple
of which some intimation is given in the dramatic piece.
Such are the materials to which the author stands indebted for the
composition of the Fortunes of Nigel a novel which may be perhaps
one of those that are more amusing on a second perusal than when read
a first time for the sake of the story the incidents of which are few
and meagre.
The Introductory Epistle is written in Lucio's phrase "according to
the trick" and would never have appeared had the writer meditated
making his avowal of the work. As it is the privilege of a masque or
incognito to speak in a feigned voice and assumed character the
author attempted while in disguise some liberties of the same sort;
and while he continues to plead upon the various excuses which the
introduction contains the present acknowledgment must serve as an
apology for a species of "hoity toity whisky frisky" pertness of
manner which in his avowed character the author should have
considered as a departure from the rules of civility and good taste.
ABBOTSFORD.
1st July 1831.
INTRODUCTORY EPISTLE
CAPTAIN CLUTTERBUCK TO THE REVEREND
DR. DRYASDUST
DEAR SIR
I readily accept of and reply to the civilities with which you have
been pleased to honour me in your obliging letter and entirely agree
with your quotation of _"Quam bonum et quam jucundum!"_ We may indeed
esteem ourselves as come of the same family or according to our
country proverb as being all one man's bairns; and there needed no
apology on your part reverend and dear sir for demanding of me any
information which I may be able to supply respecting the subject of
your curiosity. The interview which you allude to took place in the
course of last winter and is so deeply imprinted on my recollection
that it requires no effort to collect all its most minute details.
You are aware that the share which I had in introducing the Romance
called THE MONASTERY to public notice has given me a sort of
character in the literature of our Scottish metropolis. I no longer
stand in the outer shop of our bibliopolists bargaining for the
objects of my curiosity with an unrespective shop-lad hustled among
boys who come to buy Corderies and copy-books and servant girls
cheapening a pennyworth of paper but am cordially welcomed by the
bibliopolist himself with "Pray walk into the back-shop Captain.
Boy get a chair for Captain Clutterbuck. There is the newspaper
Captain--to-day's paper;" or "Here is the last new work--there is a
folder make free with the leaves;" or "Put it in your pocket and
carry it home;" or "We will make a bookseller of you sir and you
shall have it at trade price." Or perhaps if it is the worthy
trader's own publication his liberality may even extend itself to--
"Never mind booking such a trifle to _you_ sir--it is an over-copy.
Pray mention the work to your reading friends." I say nothing of the
snug well-selected literary party arranged round a turbot leg of
five-year-old mutton or some such gear or of the circulation of a
quiet bottle of Robert Cockburn's choicest black--nay perhaps of his
new ones. All these are comforts reserved to such as are freemen of
the corporation of letters and I have the advantage of enjoying them
in perfection. But all things change under the sun; and it is with no
ordinary feelings of regret that in my annual visits to the
metropolis I now miss the social and warm-hearted welcome of the
quick-witted and kindly friend who first introduced me to the public;
who had more original wit than would have set up a dozen of professed
sayers of good things and more racy humour than would have made the
fortune of as many more. To this great deprivation has been added I
trust for a time only the loss of another bibliopolical friend whose
vigorous intellect and liberal ideas have not only rendered his
native country the mart of her own literature but established there a
Court of Letters which must command respect even from those most
inclined to dissent from many of its canons. The effect of these
changes operated in a great measure by the strong sense and sagacious
calculations of an individual who knew how to avail himself to an
unhoped-for extent of the various kinds of talent which his country
produced will probably appear more clearly to the generation which
shall follow the present.
I entered the shop at the Cross to enquire after the health of my
worthy friend and learned with satisfaction that his residence in
the south had abated the rigour of the symptoms of his disorder.
Availing myself then of the privileges to which I have alluded I
strolled onward in that labyrinth of small dark rooms or _crypts_ to
speak our own antiquarian language which form the extensive back-
settlements of that celebrated publishing-house. Yet as I proceeded
from one obscure recess to another filled some of them with old
volumes some with such as from the equality of their rank on the
shelves I suspected to be the less saleable modern books of the
concern I could not help feeling a holy horror creep upon me when I
thought of the risk of intruding on some ecstatic bard giving vent to
his poetical fury; or it might be on the yet more formidable privacy
of a band of critics in the act of worrying the game which they had
just run down. In such a supposed case I felt by anticipation the
horrors of the Highland seers whom their gift of deuteroscopy compels
to witness things unmeet for mortal eye; and who to use the
expression of Collins
----"heartless oft like moody madness stare
To see the phantom train their secret work prepare."
Still however the irresistible impulse of an undefined curiosity
drove me on through this succession of darksome chambers till like
the jeweller of Delhi in the house of the magician Bennaskar I at
length reached a vaulted room dedicated to secrecy and silence and
beheld seated by a lamp and employed in reading a. blotted _revise_
[Footnote: The uninitiated must be informed that a second proof-sheet
is so called.] the person or perhaps I should rather say the Eidolon
or representative Vision of the AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY! You will not be
surprised at the filial instinct which enabled me at once to
acknowledge the features borne by this venerable apparition and that
I at once bended the knee with the classical salutation of _Salve
magne parens!_ The vision however cut me short by pointing to a
seat intimating at the same time that my presence was not expected
and that he had something to say to me.
I sat down with humble obedience and endeavoured to note the features
of him with whom I now found myself so unexpectedly in society. But on
this point I can give your reverence no satisfaction; for besides the
obscurity of the apartment and the fluttered state of my own nerves
I seemed to myself overwhelmed by a sense of filial awe which
prevented my noting and recording what it is probable the personage
before me might most desire to have concealed. Indeed his figure was
so closely veiled and wimpled either with a mantle morning-gown or
some such loose garb that the verses of Spenser might well have been
applied--
"Yet certes by her face and physnomy
Whether she man or woman only were
That could not any creature well descry."
I must however go on as I have begun to apply the masculine gender;
for notwithstanding very ingenious reasons and indeed something like
positive evidence have been offered to prove the Author of Waverley
to be two ladies of talent I must abide by the general opinion that
he is of the rougher sex. There are in his writings too many things
"Quae maribus sola tribuuntur"
to permit me to entertain any doubt on that subject. I will proceed
in the manner of dialogue to repeat as nearly as I can what passed
betwixt us only observing that in the course of the conversation my
timidity imperceptibly gave way under the familiarity of his address;
and that in the concluding part of our dialogue I perhaps argued
with fully as much confidence as was beseeming.
_Author of Waverley._ I was willing to see you Captain Clutterbuck
being the person of my family whom I have most regard for since the
death of Jedediah Cleishbotham; and I am afraid I may have done you
some wrong in assigning to you The Monastery as a portion of my
effects. I have some thoughts of making it up to you by naming you
godfather to this yet unborn babe--(he indicated the proof-sheet with
his finger)--But first touching The Monastery--How says the world--
you are abroad and can learn?
_Captain Clutterbuck._ Hem! hem!--The enquiry is delicate--I have not
heard any complaints from the Publishers.
_Author._ That is the principal matter; but yet an indifferent work is
sometimes towed on by those which have left harbour before it with
the breeze in their poop.--What say the Critics?
_Captain._ There is a general--feeling--that the White Lady is no
favourite.
_Author._ I think she is a failure myself; but rather in execution
than conception. Could I have evoked an _esprit follet_ at the same
time fantastic and interesting capricious and kind; a sort of
wildfire of the elements bound by no fixed laws or motives of
action; faithful and fond yet teazing and uncertain----
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