Just as 'The Heart of Midlothian' had produced { 327} a vivid picture of life in Edinburgh during the reign of George II, so 'The Fortunes of Nigel' reproduced the life of London in the time of King James. For this brilliant study, not only of the curious monarch, but of the strange manners and customs as well as the lawlessness of the city, which the King's folly did so much to create, the novel has been generally accorded a very high rank among Scott's productions.
[1] Quoted from Sydney's 'State Papers,' in _The Old Royal Palace of Whitehall_, by Edgar Sheppard, D.D.
[3] Edmund Dudley, the notorious agent of King Henry VII.
'Old Peveril' was one of the pet nicknames with which Scott was dubbed by some of his young legal friends in Parliament House, and he carried the sobriquet for the remainder of his life, taking great delight in it. He did not, however, take much pleasure from the composition of the novel, finding it a tiresome task from which he could only find relief by planning its successor. It marks the beginning of a malady which ultimately proved fatal. Scott concealed the symptoms from his family, but confided to a friend that he feared Peveril 'will smell of the apoplexy.' It proved a heavy undertaking, covering a period of twenty years of exciting history and three distinct, but widely differing, localities, namely, Derbyshire, the Isle of Man, and London in the time of Charles II.
In the high Peak country of Derbyshire, about fifteen miles west of Sheffield, lies the village of Castleton, nestling snugly at the foot of a somewhat precipitous hill. Away back in the time of William the Conqueror, a son of that monarch received a grant of large estates in Derbyshire, and selected the very summit of this steep and almost inaccessible rock as the site of his castle. His name was William Peveril and the bit of a ruin which still remains, high in the air above the village, is called Peveril Castle. We reached it after a very hard climb, by a steep path running zigzag across the face of a long { 329} grassy slope. It was scarcely worth the effort, for the 'castle' is now only a small square tower, of no interest whatever, except from the fact that it gave the name to one of the Waverley Novels.