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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
This is certainly the very type of biography Scott would most have desired. For him history was the clash of personalities, was a sustained human drama; he could only think of it as dynamic, moving, alive. While he was moved by ancient things, he had wit enough to know that ancient things were but relics of a living age; yet because of the living age they were descended from, he was content with relics. His imagination supplied all the life that had departed from them. Yet, curiously, his imagination seems to have needed a centre on which to focus. Clairvoyant as he was, he needed some personal belonging of the dead to be put in front of him before he could see him as once he was in his habit as a man. Hence he developed an overwhelming passion for collecting the flotsam of heroic ages; to Lady Scott it was a tiresome interference with the orderliness of house-keeping, to Sir Walter it was the central need for his creative power to set itself working. Out of it his memory, working under the spell of the contact, was roused to see and describe the man and his age. The long sword of Montrose was the most sacred object of the shrine of Abbotsford; it not only pleased Sir Walter to see it, but it actually moved him to understand Montrose. There was a curious earthliness about Sir Walter; he might weave romances in the air, but he wove them out of the solid materials of the earth.
The Laird of Abbotsford. By Dame Una Pope-Hennessey. (Putnam, 1932; 716 net.)