264 Statements concerning Sir Walter Scott. 



is much more like that of St. Abbs Head, with the steep 

 slope inland. From the novel, one would say that he 

 supposed the plain of East Lothian to extend into Berwick- 

 shire, while it seems hardly possible that the Dunglass and 

 Pease deans should have left no impression, if he had ever 

 seen them. 



He is known to have been as far as Tyningham, on the 

 Edinburgh side of Dunbar. It is certain that he never was 

 at the house at Dunglass, though the tradition has arisen 

 that he visited the neighbourhood with Sir James Hall, the 

 geologist, whom he succeeded as President of the Eoyal 

 Society of Edinburgh. 



On what grounds I do not know, Lockhart says, that Sir 

 Walter seems to have had the idea, before his illness, of 

 writing a novel on the subject of the bride who stabbed 

 her bridegroom. There undoubtedly must have been a 

 certain similarity between the case of Lord Rutherford and 

 his own, in the respect, particularly, that the parents seem 

 not to have been agreed about their daughter's affairs. 

 Whatever degree of blame may be attributable to Lady 

 Jane Belshes, for allowing so hopeless an attachment to go 

 on under her eyes, she was probably in some degree 

 captivated by the attractive young man. Words are hardly 

 strong enough to express the condemnation due to her 

 husband ; old Mr Scott, with his lofty scrupulousness, having 

 warned him that his son was making love to his daughter, 

 but being unable to persuade him that the case was at all 

 serious or worth attending to. 



Sir Walter says, in the notes to the novels written in his 

 last years, that one tradition asserted that it was the mother, 

 and not the father, who favoured Lord Eutherford ; but the 

 form of the story which he followed was probably that 

 originally known to him. 



It was both a Rutherford tradition in some degree — 

 his mother having told the traditional story, comparing 

 it with that of the novel, to Mr and Mrs Scott of Harden, 

 who must have been in the Waverley secret only a few 

 days before her last illness — and also the main facts 

 were known to her and her family by a very direct line 

 of tradition. Her aunt. Miss Margaret Swinton of Swinton, 

 ■who lived to see her grand-nephew grown up, had actually 



