VI.— SIR WALTER SCOTT.
"There he is," says Maginn, "sauntering about his grounds, with his Lowland bonnet in his hand, dressed in his old green shooting-jacket, telling stories of every stone and bush, and tree and stream, in sight—tales of battles and raids—or ghosts and fairies, as the case may be, of the days of yore.
'———ere Scotland's griefs began,
When every man you met had killed his man !'"
As to the portrait, whatever may be its inferiority, as an artistic work, we have the further testimony of the " Doctor" to the effect that "everything is correct in the picture, from the peak of his head down to his very cudgel"; while Mr. D. G. Rossetti does not doubt that " in its unflinching enjoyment of peculiarities, it gives a more exact impression of the man, as equipped for his daily life, than any likeness that could be met with."[1] It has been asserted too positively that Maginn never saw Scott on his native heather; but this he certainly may have done when visiting Blackwood at Edinburgh in 1820. Other opportunities may have occurred subsequently; but anyway, from his intimacy with Lockhart and other friends of the "Ariosto of the North," he might readily have acquired a knowledge of his peculiarities even down to the Shandean flourish of his bamboo-cane, "in the manner of Corporal Trim," adds Maginn, "as follows:"—
The desire of becoming acquainted in the body with those from whose minds we have long received delight, is natural enough; as is also the expectation to find in the one the "outward and visible sign" of the "inward and spiritual grace" we have known in the other. But this is a desire, often if not always, productive of disappointment, and could never, hardly, one would imagine, be more so than in the present instance. What becomes of the doctrine of "correspondence" if we have a faithful representation of the "Wizard of the North" in the coarse ungainly figure before us,—a bundle of amorphous garments, surmounted by a conical, shock-headed protuberance, unkempt and slovenly, as was Mephibosheth, when he came down to meet his royal patron,—though the son of Jonathan was lame in both his feet, instead of one only, a fact of which our artist has cleverly reminded us.
- ↑ The Academy, April 15, 1871.
