"That day of wrath, that dreadful day, When heaven and earth shall pass away! What power shall be the sinner's stay? How shall he meet that dreadful day? When shrivelling like a parched scroll, The flaming heavens together roll; When louder yet, and yet more dread, Swells the high trump that wakes the dead! Oh! on that day, that wrathful day, When man to judgment wakes from clay, Be THOU the trembling sinner's stay, Though heaven and earth shall pass away!"
Simple as these words, and few as these lines are, they are enough to stamp with greatness the name of the man who wrote them.'
Town and Country--Scott's Ideal--Reversion of Clerkship--Impeachment of Lord Melville--Acquittal--The Edinburgh Dinner--Scott's Song of Triumph--Nature of his Professional Duties--Social Claims and Literary Industry.
When Scott decided to abandon the Bar, he had no intention of quitting Edinburgh. Notwithstanding his delight in natural scenery and his real fondness for rural pursuits and his passion for sport, he had an equally strong attachment to the city and its old routine. 'Here is the advantage of Edinburgh' (he says in his _Journal_). 'In the country, if a sense of inability once seizes me, it haunts me from morning to night; but in Edinburgh the time is so occupied and frittered away by official duties and chance occupation, that you have not time to play Master Stephen and be gentlemanlike and melancholy. On the other hand, you never feel in town those spirit-stirring influences--those glances of sunshine that make amends for clouds and mist. The country is said to be quieter life; not to me, I am sure. In the town the business I have to do hardly costs me more thought than just occupies my mind, and I have as much of gossip and ladylike chat as consumes the time pleasantly enough. In the country I am thrown entirely on my own resources, and there is no medium betwixt happiness and the reverse.' To carry out his ideal, therefore, of a life alternating between town and country, and enjoying the best of both, and to keep his mind easy about the provision--generous, of course--which he should make for his increasing family, Scott was not satisfied with an income of £1000 a year. He accordingly set about obtaining another post--such a post (he frankly puts it) as an author might hope to retreat upon, without any perceptible alteration of circumstances, whenever the time came that the public grew weary of him, or he himself tired of his pen. He hoped, in fact, to obtain a clerkship in the Court of Session, and his friends began to work for it just after the _Lay_ was published. These friends were the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Melville, and, as we have seen, Pitt himself had given orders that something should be done. Near the end of 1805 it was arranged that Scott should have the succession to the clerkship held by Mr. Home of Wedderburn. The old gentleman was to retain the whole salary during his life, while Scott was to do the work and fall into the salary at Home's death. The matter was arranged just before Lord Melville's retirement, but a mistake having been made in the patent, Scott's commission had to be made out by the Home Secretary of the Whig Government of 1806. Thus it appeared as if he had owed his appointment to the Whigs, and some of the meaner sort among the local people grumbled loudly and complained of the preference. Scott resented this doubly, since he really owed nothing to the Whig Ministry and would never have accepted a favour at their hands. Lockhart says that this incident was the occasion of his making himself prominent for a time as a decided Tory partisan.