Sitting in the Library that same night, the talk turned on Smollett and Fielding, both driven abroad, as Scott recalled, like himself, through declining health, and we hardly wonder if there was the feeling present to his mind that, like them, he, too, might not return.
Mention of Yarrow instinctively calls up the name of James Hogg, a true friend of Scott, notwithstanding Lockhart's farrago. Hogg and Lockhart were constantly misunderstanding one another. In one sense, they were wide as the poles asunder--Lockhart aristocratic to the finger-tips, Hogg excessively plebeian. But that should have made no difference. It made no difference with Scott. Lockhart undoubtedly tried to help Hogg a good deal, which Hogg resented more than once; hence Lockhart's strictures. But for all that, the Shepherd is a picturesque and lovable figure, even in the pages of Lockhart. Hogg's alleged 'insult' to the dust of Scott--the 'Scorpion's' most stinging charge against him--amounts, after all, to very little. That Hogg was never further from insult in the writing of his little brochure[12] seems perfectly clear. There are, to be sure, some things that had been better left unsaid. But the book is, nevertheless, one of the brightest and most natural pen-portraits of Scott that we have. Hogg was a regular visitor at Abbotsford. Laidlaw denies that he ever, even in his cups, descended to 'Wattie' and 'Charlotte.' Scott smiled at Hogg's inordinate vanity, and Hogg had one or two stupid estrangements with him. But Sir Walter's attachment to his more humble compeer was never lessened in the least until the day when the two friends parted for ever at the Gordon Arms in Yarrow--the dearest vale on earth to them both.[13]
On March 5, 1817, at Castle Street, in the midst of a merry dinner-party, Scott was seized with a sudden illness--the first since his childhood. The disorder was cramp in the stomach of an unusually severe type. From Gillies's 'Recollections' we learn that, although disabled and compelled to retire to his room, he was unwilling that the festivity of the evening should be broken up, and actually sent a message to Mrs. Siddons that nothing would do him so much good as to hear her sing. He would, he said, be all right in the morning. But the illness lasted a week, and was more serious than had been anticipated. It was, indeed, the first of a series of such paroxysms, which for years visited him periodically, and from which he never absolutely recovered. Probably the best index to his feelings at this period is found in what may be described as the most pathetically poetic verses he ever penned. He was at Abbotsford, battling with depression and melancholy, and seldom without a sense of pain. On the bare height above Cauldshiels, with its then magnificent prospect of Melrose and the open valley of the Tweed, hemmed in on the west by the Selkirkshire uplands, he wrote, on one lovely autumn evening, these exquisite lines--exquisite because expressing the deepest passion of his soul at the moment: