John Graham Gilbert

January 15.—Day began with beggars as usual, and John Nicolson has not sense to keep them out. I never yield, however, to this importunity, thinking it wrong that what I can spare to meritorious poverty, of which I hear and see too much, should be diverted by impudent importunity. I was detained at the Parliament House till nearly three by the great case concerning prescription, Maule v. Maule. This was made up to me by hearing an excellent opinion from Lord Corehouse, with a curious discussion in apicibus juris. I disappointed Graham of a sitting for my picture.

Scott refers in his January 15, 1829 journal entry to Graham, who was John Graham Gilbert.  Gilbert ultimately was able to complete a portrait of Sir Walter.  A Glaswegian by birth, according to James MacLehose (“Memoirs and Portraits of one hundred Glasgow men”) Gilbert produced 39 portraits for exhibition by the Scottish Academy during his time in Edinburgh (1827 – 1841).  An image of Gilbert’s portrait of Sir Walter is available at Edinburgh University’s Walter Scott archive: 

http://www.jamessmithnoelcollection.org/images/sir%20walter%20scott.jpg

Columbus Leaves the New World

'...Agreeably to your advice, I have actually read over Madoc a second time, and I confess have seen much beauty which escaped me in the first perusal. Yet (which yet, by the way, is almost as vile a monosyllable as but] I cannot feel quite the interest I would wish to do. The difference of character which you notice, reminds me of what by Ben Jonson and other old comedians were called humours, which consisted rather in the personification of some individual passion or propensity, than of an actual individual man. Also, I cannot give up my objection, that what was strictly true of Columbus becomes an unpleasant falsehood when told of some one else. Suppose I was to write a fictitious book of travels, I should certainly do ill to copy exactly the incidents which befell Mungo Park or Bruce of Kinnaird. What was true of them would incontestably prove at once the falsehood and plagiarism of my supposed journal. It is not but what the incidents are natural—but it is their having already happened, which strikes us when they are transferred to imaginary persons. Could any one bear the story of a second city being taken by a wooden horse?...'

The text above was taken from a letter Walter Scott sent to the English poet Anna Seward, taken from John Gibson Lockhart's "Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott".  The main topic was MacPherson's Ossian poem fraud.  Scott evokes Christopher Columbus, and the events during his travels as unfit for repackaging in fiction. 

What were some of Columbus' adventures?  On the day he departed the New World to return to Spain, January 15, 1493, he considers many circumstances in his journal, as translated by Cecil Jane.  'He [Columbus] says that he wished to depart, because now there is no profit in remaining, owing to those disagreements which had occurred; he must mean the dispute with the Indians...that all the abundance of gold was in the district of the town of La Navidad...there would be difficulties in the island of Carib, because that people is said to eat human flesh...and to the island of Matinano, which is said to be entirely peopled by women without men, and to see both, and to take some, as he says...'

The Burke and Hare Case

The story of the West Port murders is fairly well known.  Between 1827 and 1828, William Burke and William Hare went on a killing spree in order to sell bodies for dissection.  The purchase was Doctor Robert Knox.

January 15, 1829 finds Sir Walter Scott grappling with how to deal with Doctor Knox's work.  From Scott's Journal:

...I went to the Council of the Royal Society, which was convened at my request, to consider whether we ought to hear a paper on anatomical subjects read by Mr. Knox, whose name has of late been deeply implicated in a criminal prosecution against certain wretches, who had murdered many persons and sold their bodies to professors of the anatomical science. Some thought that our declining to receive the paper would be a declaration unfavourable to Dr. Knox. I think hearing it before Mr. Knox has made any defence (as he is stated to have in view) would be an intimation of our preference of the cause of science to those of morality and common humanity. Mr. Knox's friends undertook to deal with him about suffering the paper to be omitted for the present, while adhuc coram judice lis est.