It is only when we remember how often this history must have dwelt on Sir Walter's mind that we can understand the tender subtlety of design with which he has completed, even in the weary time of his declining life, the almost eventless story of 'Redgauntlet,' and given, as we shall presently see, in connection with it, the most complete, though disguised, portion of his own biography.
IV. Beardie. I find no details of Beardie's life given by Scott, but he was living at Leasudden when his landlord, Scott of Harden, [53] living at Mertoun House, addressed to him the lines given in the note to the introduction to the sixth canto of 'Marmion,' in which Scott himself partly adopts the verses, writing from Mertoun House to Richard Heber.
"For course of blood, our proverbs dream, Is warmer than the mountain stream. And thus my Christmas still I hold Where my great-grandsire came of old, [54] 'With amber beard and flaxen hair, And reverend apostolic air, The feast and holytide to share, And mix sobriety with wine, And honest mirth with thoughts divine.' Small thought was his, in after-time, E'er to be hitched into a rhyme. The simple sire could only boast That he was loyal to his cost, The banished race of kings revered, And lost his land--but kept his beard,--"
"a mark of attachment," Scott adds in his note, "which I suppose had been common during Cromwell's usurpation; for in Cowley's 'Cutter of Coleman Street' one drunken cavalier upbraids another that when he was not able to pay a barber, he affected to 'wear a beard for the King.'"
Observe, here, that you must always be on your guard, in reading Scott's notes or private letters, against his way of kindly laughing at what he honours more deeply than he likes to confess. The house in which Beardie died was still standing when Sir Walter wrote his autobiography, (1808), at the north-east entrance of the churchyard of Kelso.
He left three sons. Any that remain of the family of the elder are long since settled in America (male heirs extinct). James Scott, well known in India as one of the original settlers of Prince of Wales Island, was a son of the youngest, who died at Lasswade, in Midlothian (first mention of Scott's Lasswade).