from disappointed radicalism; nor was it the result of reasoned conviction.  It was inborn and was nursed into a sentimental Jacobitism by ancestral traditions and by an early prepossession in favour of the Stuarts—­a Scottish dynasty—­reinforced by encounters with men in the Highlands who had been out in the ’45.  It did not interfere with a practical loyalty to the reigning house and with what seems like a somewhat exaggerated deference to George IV.  Personally the most modest of men, he was proud to trace his descent from “auld Wat of Harden” [13] and to claim kinship with the bold Buccleuch.  He used to make annual pilgrimages to Harden Tower, “the incunabula of his race”; and “in the earlier part of his life,” says Lockhart, “he had nearly availed himself of his kinsman’s permission to fit up the dilapidated peel for his summer residence.”

Byron wrote:  “I twine my hope of being remembered in my line with my land’s language.”  But Scott wished to associate his name with the land itself.  Abbotsford was more to him than Newstead could ever have been to Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain, while Scott was a commoner and created his.  Too much has been said in condemnation of Scott’s weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was to become a laird and found a family; that he was more gratified when the King made him a baronet than when the public bought his books, that the expenses of Abbotsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all comers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy.  Leslie Stephen and others have even made merry over Scott’s Gothic,[14] comparing his plaster-of-Paris ’scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more genuine than the feudalism of “The Castle of Otranto.”  Scott was imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness.  If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish.  The artist or the philosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition of owning land and having “a stake in the country,” but the ambition is a very human one and has its good side.  In Scott the desire was more social than personal.  It was not that title and territory were feathers in his cap, but that they bound him more closely to the dear soil of Scotland and to the national, historic past.

The only deep passion in Scott’s poetry is patriotism, the passion of place.  In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid, picturesque beauty of the descriptions are indeed exciting to the imagination; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tears come into the reader’s eyes, as they must have done into the poet’s.  A dozen such passages occur at once to the memory; the last stand of the Scottish nobles around their king at Flodden; the view of Edinburgh—­“mine own romantic town “—­from Blackford Hill;