Retirement

Author Charles Lamb wrote a series of letters about his tenure with the British East India Company.  On April 6, 1825, he writes about his retirement.  From “The Best Letters of Charles Lamb”:

‘…a few days later, April 6, 1825, he [Charles Lamb] joyfully wrote to Barton,--

  "My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my

  recent emancipation that I have scarce steadiness of hand,

  much more mind, to compose a letter, I am free, B.B.,--free

  as air!

  "'The little bird that wings the sky

  Knows no such liberty,'

  I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o'clock. I

  came home forever!"

The quality of the generosity of the East India directors was not

strained in Lamb's case. It should be recorded as an agreeable

commercial phenomenon that these officials, men of business acting in "a

business matter,"--words too often held to exclude all such Quixotic

matters as sentiment, gratitude, and Christian equity between man and

man,--were not only just, but munificent. [16] From the path of Charles

and Mary Lamb--already beset with anxieties grave enough they removed

forever the shadow of want. Lamb's salary at the time of his retirement

was nearly seven hundred pounds a year, and the offer made to him was a

pension of four hundred and fifty, with a deduction of nine pounds a

year for his sister, should she survive him…’

Things did not work out as well for Walter Scott’s brother Robert, with regard to his experience with the same company.  The story, in Scott’s own words, is told in John Gibson Lockhart’s “Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott”.

‘…My eldest brother (that is, the eldest whom I remember to have seen) was Robert Scott, so called after my uncle, of whom I shall have much to say hereafter. He was bred in the King's service, under Admiral, then Captain William Dickson, and was in most of Rodney's battles. His temper was bold and haughty, and to me was often checkered with what I felt to be capricious tyranny. In other respects I loved him much, for he had a strong turn for literature, read poetry with taste and judgment, and composed verses himself, which had gained him great applause among his messmates. Witness the following elegy upon the supposed loss of the vessel, composed the night before Rodney's celebrated battle of April the 12th, 1782. It alludes to the various amusements of his mess:—

"No more the geese shall cackle on the poop,
No more the bagpipe through the orlop sound,
No more the midshipmen, a jovial group,
Shall toast the girls, and push the bottle round.
In death's dark road at anchor fast they stay,
Till Heaven's loud signal shall in thunder roar;
Then starting up, all hands shall quick obey,
Sheet home the topsail, and with speed unmoor."

…I have often thought how he [Robert] might have distinguished himself had he continued the navy until the present times, so glorious for nautical exploit. But the peace of Paris cut off all hopes of promotion for those who had not great interest; and some disgust which his proud spirit had taken at harsh usage from a superior officer combined to throw poor Robert into the East India Company’s service, for which his habits were ill adapted. He made two voyages to the East, and died a victim to the climate in . . .’

The last sentence is left incomplete.

Macellum of Pozzuoli

On the 10^th of January [1832], I accompanied him to Pozzouli, and the late Mr. Laing Meason was of the party.  Here we succeeded in getting Sir Walter placed upon  a heap of ruins, where he might see the remains of the Thermae, commonly called the Temple of Serapis.  His observation was, that we might tell him anything, and he would believe at all, for many of his friends, and particularly Mr. Morritt, had frequently tried to drive classical antiquities, as they were called, into his head, but they had always found his “skull too thick”.

From John Gibson Lockhart’s “Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott”, The Temple of Serapis mentioned above is the Macellum of Pozzuoli, in the province of Naples.  It was excavated in the 18^th century, and a statue of Serapis was found there, indicating the site was a Serapeum. 

On the North Bridge

One of the New York City area news stories today involves a man who sawed through cell tower cables to disrupt transmission, and thereby express his dissatisfaction with a newly built cell tower in his neighborhood.  Others in this man's neighborhood complained that the cell tower had sprung up virtually overnight, with no public hearings concerning its construction.   Development issues are nothing new, and Lord Henry Cockburn records in his memoirs that on December 2^nd, 1817, a public hearing was held concerning the erection of the North Bridge Buildings in Edinburgh.  Per Cockburn’s history, public meetings were not common at that point.

‘The new street along the southern side of the Calton Hill disclosed some glorious prospects, or at least exhibited them from new points. One of these was the view westward, over the North Bridge. But we had only begun to perceive its importance, when its interception by what are now called the North Bridge Buildings raised our indignation; and we thought that the magistrates, who allowed them to be set agoing in silence, had betrayed ns. We were therefore very angry, and had recourse to another of these new things called public meetings, which we were beginning to feel the power of. It was held on the 2d of December 1817. Professor Playfair presided; this being, I suppose, the only time in his life on which that unobtrusive and gentle philosopher permitted himself to be placed in such a position. James Stuart of Dunearn explained the matter in a clear and sensible speech. Old Henry Mackenzie made his first appearance at such a meeting, saying that, though no speaker, it was impossible to submit in silence to the destruction of the town, and that “facit indignatio versum." Resolutions were passed, a subscription opened, and we went to law, where we got an ornate speech from Cranstoun, who recited " my own romantic town" to the Court. But this was all we got. For while the judges were looking rather favourable, our funds ebbed, and of course our ardour cooled. Then persons of taste began to hint that we were all wrong, and that the position of the buildings was beautiful; and at last another meeting was held in May 1818, when we struck our colours. So we lost about £1000; the magistrates got a fright; and the buildings stand. But much good was done by the clamour. Attention was called nearly for the first time, to the duty of maintaining the beauty of Edinburgh. A respectable and organized resistance of municipal power was new here, and the example was not lost, though the immediate object of the battle was.’

North Bridge was, of course, a familiar site to Walter Scott.  J.G. Lockhart mentions in his “Memoirs of the life of Sir Walter Scott” an instance of Scott mulling over poetry while on the bridge:

‘…Not long before this piece began to be handed about in Edinburgh, Thomas Campbell had made his appearance there, and at once seized a high place in the literary world by his 'Pleasures of Hope.' Among the most eager to welcome him had been Scott; and I find the brotherbard thus expressing himself concerning the MS. of Cadyow :—

'' The verses of Cadyow Castle are perpetually ringing in my imagination—

'Where mightiest of the beasts of chase

That roam in woody Caledon,
Crashing the forest in his race,
The mountain bull comes thundering on—'

and the arrival of Hamilton, when

'Reeking from the recent deed,

He dashed his carbine on the ground.'

I have repeated these lines so often on the North Bridge that the -whole fraternity of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head, which strong, pithy poetry excites."

STOPT!

'...I believe it  was just about this time that Scott had abandoned his place in Mr Jeffrey's corps. The journal had been started among the clever young society with which Edinburgh abounded when they were both entering life as barristers; and Jeffrey's principal coadjutors for some time were Sydney Smith, Brougham, Horner, Scott himself—and on scientific subjects, Playfair...'

Professor John Playfair was well known in Edinburgh society during Scott's time.  As a mathematician, he even has an axiom named after him; Playfair's Axiom.  John Playfair was born on March 10, 1748.

The text above is from Lockhart's "Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott".  The journal referenced is the Edinburgh Review, which was published by Archibald Constable.  Scott initially supported the Review, but became so fed up with the politics that he canceled, later supporting publisher John Murray in developing the Quarterly Review. 

Walter Scott's relationship with Edinburgh Review is described in Samuel Smiles' "A Publisher and his Friends": '...Walter Scott still continued to write for the Edinburgh, notwithstanding the differences of opinion which existed between himself and the editor as to political questions. He was rather proud of the Review, inasmuch as it was an outgrowth of Scottish literature...'  And on the rift: 'A severe and unjust review of "Marmion," by Jeffrey, appeared in 1808, accusing Scott of a mercenary spirit in writing for money (though Jeffrey himself was writing for money in the same article), and further irritating Scott by asserting that he "had neglected Scottish feelings and Scottish characters." "Constable," writes Scott to his brother Thomas, in November 1808, "or rather that Bear, his partner [Mr. Hunter], has behaved by me of late not very civilly, and I owe Jeffrey a flap with a foxtail on account of his review of 'Marmion,' and thus doth the whirligig of time bring about my revenges." 

Smiles quotes Lockart on the subject '..."When he read the article on 'Marmion,' and another on foreign politics, in the same number of the Edinburgh Review, Murray said to himself, 'Walter Scott has feelings, both as a gentleman and a Tory, which these people must now have wounded; the alliance between him and the whole clique of the Edinburgh Review is now shaken'"...'

The final straw came happened to occur when Murray himself was visiting Scott at Ashestiel '..During Murray's visit to Ashestiel No. 26 of the Edinburgh Review arrived. It contained an article entitled "Don Cevallos on the Occupation of Spain." It was long supposed that the article was written by Brougham, but it has since been ascertained that Jeffrey himself was the author of it. This article gave great offence to the friends of rational liberty and limited monarchy in this country. Scott forthwith wrote to Constable: "The Edinburgh Review had become such as to render it impossible for me to become a contributor to it; now it is such as I can no longer continue to receive or read it."


"The list of the then subscribers," said Mr. Cadell to Mr. Lockhart, "exhibits, in an indignant dash of Constable's pen opposite Mr. Scott's name, the word 'STOPT!'"...'

Bonnie Prince Charlie Passes

'Soon after his arrival I took Sir Walter to St. Peter's, which he had resolved to visit, that he might see the tomb of the last of the Stuarts...' (from Lockhart's "Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott")

As Sir Walter Scott's life was nearing its end, he toured Italy, including a visit to Rome (April 1832).  Sir William Gell was in Rome at the same time, and helped to make Scott comfortable while there.  Gell took Scott to St. Peter's Bascilica in the Vatican where Charles Edward Stuart, his brother Henry and their parents are interred.

Bonnie Prince Charlie died on January 31, 1788.  Initially, he was buried in the Cathedral of Frascati, where his brother Henry served as Bishop.  Charles' heart remains physically in Frascati, while the rest of his remains were transferred to St. Peter's.

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...'

Friedrich Schiller

German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller was born November 10, 1759.  Fourteen years later, and shortly after Walter Scott was born, the Duke of Swabia, for whom Schiller's father served, agreed to send the elder Schiller's sons to the ducal academy.  Thus, this talented future poet received a first-rate education.  Through his writings and thought, and later through his friendship and dialogue with Goethe, the two German poets forged what became known as the Weimar Classicism.  German thought and literature became extremely popular in Scotland, and influenced Walter Scott and his crowd.

“I do not know anything of a play of mine, my dear friend, unless it be a sort of half-mad German tragedy which I wrote many years ago when my taste was very green and when, like the rest of the world, I was taken in with the bombast of Schiller.”


- Sir Walter Scott to Lady Abercorn  from Sir Walter Scott, "Familiar Letters".
 
Walter Scott was "young and green" in 1788, when according to biographer John Gibson Lockhart, he and his cronies took a strong interest in German literature.  As Lockhart relates, 'The German class, of which we have an account in one of the Prefaces of 1830, was formed before the Christmas of 1792, and it included almost all these loungers of the Mountain. In the essay now referred to Scott traces the interest excited in Scotland on the subject of German literature to a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, on the 21st of April, 1788, by the author of The Man of Feeling. "The literary persons of Edinburgh," he says, "were then first made aware of the existence of works of genius in a language cognate with the English, and possessed of the same manly force of expression; they learned at the same time that the taste which dictated the German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to the English as their language: those who were from their youth accustomed to admire Shakespeare and Milton, became acquainted for the first time with a race of poets, who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming boundaries of the universe, and investigate the realms of Chaos and Old Night; and of dramatists, who, disclaiming the pedantry of the unities, sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities and extravagance, to present life on the stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all its boundless variety of character.... Their fictitious narratives, their ballad poetry, and other branches of their literature, which are particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagant and the supernatural, began also to occupy the attention of the British literati. In Edinburgh, where the remarkable coincidence between the German language and the Lowland Scottish encouraged young men to approach this newly discovered spring of literature, a class was formed of six or seven intimate friends, who proposed to make themselves acquainted (p. 185) with the German language. They were in the habit of being much together, and the time they spent in this new study was felt as a period of great amusement. One source of this diversion was the laziness of one of their number, the present author, who, averse to the necessary toil of grammar, and the rules, was in the practice of fighting his way to the knowledge of the German by his acquaintance with the Scottish and Anglo-Saxon dialects, and of course frequently committed blunders which were not lost on his more accurate and more studious companions." The teacher, Dr. Willich, a medical man, is then described as striving with little success to make his pupils sympathize in his own passion for the "sickly monotony" and "affected ecstasies" of Gessner's Death of Abel; and the young students, having at length acquired enough of the language for their respective purposes, as selecting for their private pursuits, some the philosophical treatises of Kant, others the dramas of Schiller and Goethe. The chief, if not the only Kantist of the party, was, I believe, John Macfarlan of Kirkton; among those who turned zealously to the popular belles-lettres of Germany were, with Scott, his most intimate friends of the period, William Clerk, William Erskine, and Thomas Thomson....'
 
 

The Baronetcy of Nova Scotia

'...it is not to be omitted, that through the Swintons Sir Walter Scott could trace himself to William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, the poet and dramatist...'

The above text is from "Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott", by John Gibson Lockhart.  In addition to being a poet and dramatist, William Alexander was a colonizer, receiving, on September 29, 1621, a charter to colonize the Baronetcy of Nova Scotia (from Rampant Scotland).

Alexander's territory, granted to him by King James I of England, stretched through New Brunswick into what is now part of the United States.  An attempt to establish a colony called Port Royal effectively bankrupted Alexander by 1632. 

In 1636, under the regime of Charles I, Alexander was made Earl of Stirling.  Charles also gave him rights to Long Island (now part of New York), from the Plymouth Colony.

Reading Austen

September 18 [1827].—Wrote five pages of the Tales [of a Grandfather]. Walked from Huntly Burn, having gone in the carriage. Smoked my cigar with Lockhart after dinner, and then whiled away the evening over one of Miss Austen's novels. There is a truth of painting in her writings which always delights me. They do not, it is true, get above the middle classes of society, but there she is inimitable.

Walter Scott enjoyed Jane Austen's novels, as this entry from his Journal indicates.  John Gibson Lockhart, in his "Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott" records being with Scott (1831), and his mentioning Miss Austen:

 '...Among some other talk, in returning, he [Scott] spoke with praise of Miss Ferrier as a novelist, and then with still higher praise of Miss Austen. Of the latter he said—" I find myself every now and then with one of her books in my hand. There's a finishing-off in some of her scenes that is really quite above everybody else...'

Leaving Naples

April 15, Naples.—I am on the eve of leaving Naples after a residence of three or four months, my strength strongly returning, though the weather has been very uncertain. What with the interruption occasioned by the cholera and other inconveniences, I have not done much. I have sent home only the letters by L.L. Stuart and three volumes of the Siege of Malta. I sent them by Lord Cowper's son—Mr. Cowper returning, his leave being out—and two chests of books by the Messrs. Turner, Malta, who are to put them on board a vessel, to be forwarded to Mr. Cadell through Whittaker. I have hopes they will come to hand safe. I have bought a small closing carriage, warranted new and English, cost me £200, for the convenience of returning home. It carries Anne, Charles, and the two servants, and we start to-morrow morning for Rome, after which we shall be starting homeward, for the Greek scheme is blown up, as Sir Frederick Adam is said to be going to Madras, so he will be unable to send a frigate as promised. I have spent on the expenses of medical persons and books, etc., a large sum, yet not excessive...


From Scott's Journal.

Scott's departure from Abbotsford to Naples was covered a few posts ago.  Scott's entourage arrived in Naples on December 17, 1831.  After nearly four months of rest and recuperation, he is leaving on April 15, 1832.  According to Lockhart ("Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott"), the person he saw most on this trip was Sir William Gell, who had also turned to Naples for his health.    Scott's post from this day discusses his "Siege of Malta", which has recently been published.  Scott also logs the story of Il Bizarro; also recently published.  Lockhart's biography relates that Scott worked on these stories through much of his time in Naples.