soon join the Israelites in Egypt in their heavy task of making bricks without clay. Besides, I know, as a small farmer, that good husbandry consists in not taking the same crop too frequently from the same soil; and as turnips come after wheat, according to the best rules of agriculture, I take it that an edition of Swift will do well after such a scourging crop as 'Marmion.'" 1

These fears of the brave, then, were not unfamiliar to Scott; but he audaciously disregarded all of them in the composition of "Guy Mannering." He had just spun his web, like the spider of his simile, he had just taken off his intellectual fields the "scourging crop ' of "The Lord of the Isles," he had just received the discouraging news of its comparative failure, when he "buckled to,❞ achieved "Guy Mannering" in six weeks, and published it. Molière tells us that he wrote "Les Fâcheux" in a fortnight; and a French critic adds that it reads indeed as if it had been written in a fortnight. Perhaps a self-confident censor might venture a similar opinion about "Guy Mannering." It assuredly shows traces of haste; the plot wanders at its own will; and we may believe that the Author often did not see his own way out of the wood. But there is little harm in that. "If I do not know what is coming next," a modern novelist has remarked, "how can the public know?" Curiosity, at least, is likely to be excited by this happy-go-lucky manner of Scott's. "The worst of it is, as he wrote to Lady Abercorn about his poems (June 9, 1808), "that I am not very good or patient in slow and careful composition; and sometimes I remind myself of the drunken man, who could run long after he could not walk." 2 Scott could

1 March 13, 1808. Copied from the Collection of Lady Napier and Ettrick.

2 He was probably thinking of a famous Edinburgh character, 'Singing Jamie Balfour." Jamie was found very drunk and adhering to the pavement one night. He could not raise himself;

certainly run very well, though averse to a plodding motion.

The account of the year's work which preceded "Guy Mannering" is given by Lockhart, and is astounding. In 1814 Scott had written, Lockhart believes, the greater part of the "Life of Swift," most of "Waverley and the "Lord of the Isles; he had furnished essays to the "Encyclopædia," and had edited "The Memorie of the Somervilles." The spider might well seem spun out, the tilth exhausted. But Scott had a fertility, a spontaneity, of fancy equalled only, if equalled at all, by Alexandre Dumas.

On November 7 of this laborious year, 1814, Scott was writing to Mr. Joseph Train, thanking him for a parcel of legendary lore, including the Galloway tale of the wandering astrologer and a budget of gypsy traditions.1 Falling in the rich soil of Scott's imagination, the tale of the astrologer yielded a name and an opening to Guy Mannering," while the gypsy lore blossomed into the legend of Meg Merrilies. The seed of the but when helped to his feet, ran his preserver a race to the tavern, and won!

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1 Mr. Train was an officer of the Inland Revenue. He was quite self-educated, had been a weaver, and had served in the militia. He published verses, attracted the attention of friends, and was rewarded, like Burns, by a gaugership. Train made a happier use of his office than Burns. He devoted himself to collecting the traditions of Galloway, some of which he used in a new volume of poetry. Scott was pleased with the poems, and on July 18, 1814, Train sent Scott a quantity of legends, with his book of verses. Scott's reception of these made Mr. Train his friend and literary vassal for life. On March 25, 1816, he published and circulated printed lists of questions about folklore and legend. "I have scattered these queries solely for the purpose of obtaining local information to give you," he writes (Abbotsford MSS.). He also gathered curiosities, gifts for his "revered Sir Walter," as, in later years, he always addressed him. Mr. Train continued to be Scott's friend and correspondent till death severed them. He prospered in his profession, on the whole, and his life was happy and useful. A brief biography of him by Mr. R. Patterson was published in 1857.

novel was now sown. But between November 11 and December 25 Scott was writing the three last cantos of the "Lord of the Isles."1 Yet before the "Lord of the Isles" was published (Jan. 18, 1815), two volumes of "Guy Mannering" were in print! (Letter to Morritt, Jan. 19, 1815.) The novel was issued on Feb. 24, 1815. Scott, as he says somewhere, was like the turnspit dog, into whose wheel a hot cinder is dropped to encourage his activity. Scott needed hot cinders in the shape of proof-sheets fresh from the press, and he worked most busily when the printer's devil was waiting. In this case, not only the printer's devil, but the wolf was at the door. The affairs of the Ballantynes clamoured for money. In their necessity and his own, Scott wrote at the rate of a volume in ten days, and for some financial reason published "Guy Mannering" with Messrs. Longmans, not with Constable. Scott was at this moment facing creditors and difficulties as Napoleon faced the armies of the Allies, present everywhere, everywhere daring and successful. True, his "Lord of the Isles" was a disappointment, as James Ballantyne informed him. 'Well, James, so be it; but you know we must not droop, for we cannot afford to give over. Since one line has failed, we must just stick to something else." And so he dismissed me, and resumed his novel."

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In these circumstances, far from inspiring, was "Guy Mannering" written and hurried through the press. The story has its own history: one can watch the various reminiscences and experiences of life that crystallized together in Scott's mind, and grouped themselves fantastically into his unpremeditated plot. Sir Walter gives, in the preface of 1829, the legend which he heard from John Mac-Kinlay, his father's Highland servant; on this he meant to found a 1 Lockhart, v. 15. 2 Lockhart, v. 21.

tale more in Hawthorne's manner than in his own.1 That plan he changed "in the course of printing," leaving only just enough of astrology to annoy pedantic reviewers and foolish Puritans. Whence came the

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rest of the plot, - the tale of the long-lost heir, and so on? The true heir, "kept out of his own, " and returning in disguise, has been a favourite character ever since Homer sang of Odysseus, and probably long before that. But it is just possible that Scott had a certain modern instance in his mind. In turning over the old manuscript diary at Branxholme Park (mentioned in a note to "Waverley "), the Editor lighted on a singular tale, which, in the diarist's opinion, might have suggested "Guy Mannering" to Sir Walter. The resemblance between the story of Vanbeest Brown and the hero of the diarist was scanty; but in a long letter of Scott's to Lady Abercorn (May 21, 1813), the Editor finds Sir Walter telling his correspondent the very narrative recorded in the Branxholme Park diary. Singular things happen, Sir Walter says; and he goes on to describe a case just heard in the court where he is sitting as Clerk of Sessions. Briefly, the anecdote is this: A certain Mr. Carruthers of Dormont had reason to suspect his wife's fidelity. While proceedings for a divorce were pending, Mrs. Carruthers bore a daughter, of whom her husband, of course, was legally the father. But he did not believe in the relationship, and sent the infant girl to be brought up, in ignorance of her origin and in seclusion, among the Cheviot Hills. Here she somehow learned the facts of her own story. She mar

1 An English ballad on a cognate legend is printed as an appendix to Lockhart's fifth volume.

2 Such a one was Mr. Timothy Touchstone, author of a canting "Letter to the Author of 'Waverley'" (Hatchards, London, 1820).

3 In Lady Napier's collection of letters.

ried a Mr. Routledge, the son of a yeoman, and " compounded" her rights (but not those of her issue) for a small sum of ready money, paid by old Dormont. She bore a boy; then she and her husband died in poverty. Their son was sent by a friend to the East Indies, and was presented with a packet of papers, which he left unopened at a lawyer's. The young man made a fortune in India, returned to Scotland, and took a shooting in Dumfriesshire, near Dormont, his ancestral home. He lodged at a small inn hard by, and the landlady, struck by his name, began to gossip with him about his family history. He knew nothing of the facts which the landlady disclosed, but, impressed by her story, sent for and examined his neglected packet of papers. Then he sought legal opinion, and was advised, by President Blair, that he had a claim worth presenting on the estate of Dormont. "The first decision of the cause," writes Scott, 66 was favourable." The true heir celebrated his legal victory by a dinnerparty, and his friends saluted him as "Dormont." Next morning he was found dead.

Such is the true tale. As it occupied Scott's mind in 1813, and as he wrote "Guy Mannering" in 1814-15, it is not impossible that he may have borrowed his wandering heir, who returns by pure accident to his paternal domains, and there learns his origin at a woman's lips, from the Dormont case. The resemblance of the stories, at least, was close enough to strike a shrewd observer some seventy years ago. Another possible source of the plottic origin, certainly is suggested by Mr. Robert Chambers in "Illustrations of the Author of Waverley."" A Maxwell of Glenormiston, "a religious and bigoted recluse," sent his only son and heir to a Jesuit College in Flanders, left his estate in his brother's management, and died. The wicked uncle alleged that

a more roman