The Fortunes of Nigel

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A TALE WHICH HOLDETH CHILDREN FROM PLAY & OLD MEN FROM THE CHIMNEY
CORNER
--SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

The FORTUNES OF NIGEL

by Sir WALTER SCOTT Bart

INTRODUCTION

But why should lordlings all our praise engross?
Rise, honest man, and sing the Man of Ross.

Pope

Having, in the tale of the Heart of Mid-Lothian, succeeded in some
degree in awakening an interest in behalf of one devoid of those
accomplishments which belong to a heroine almost by right, I was next
tempted to choose a hero upon the same unpromising plan; and as worth
of character, goodness of heart, and rectitude of principle, were
necessary to one who laid no claim to high birth, romantic
sensibility, or any of the usual accomplishments of those who strut
through the pages of this sort of composition, I made free with the
name of a person who has left the most magnificent proofs of his
benevolence and charity that the capital of Scotland has to display.

To the Scottish reader little more need be said than that the man
alluded to is George Heriot. But for those south of the Tweed, it may
be necessary to add, that the person so named was a wealthy citizen of
Edinburgh, and the King's goldsmith, who followed James to the English
capital, and was so successful in his profession, as to die, in 1624,
extremely wealthy for that period. He had no children; and after
making a full provision for such relations as might have claims upon
him, he left the residue of his fortune to establish an hospital, in
which the sons of Edinburgh freemen are gratuitously brought up and
educated for the station to which their talents may recommend them,
and are finally enabled to enter life under respectable auspices. The
hospital in which this charity is maintained is a noble quadrangle of
the Gothic order, and as ornamental to the city as a building, as the
manner in which the youths are provided for and educated, renders it
useful to the community as an institution. To the honour of those who
have the management, (the Magistrates and Clergy of Edinburgh), the
funds of the Hospital have increased so much under their care, that it
now supports and educates one hundred and thirty youths annually, many
of whom have done honour to their country in different situations.

The founder of such a charity as this may be reasonably supposed to
have walked through life with a steady pace, and an observant eye,
neglecting no opportunity of assisting those who were not possessed of
the experience necessary for their own guidance. In supposing his
efforts directed to the benefit of a young nobleman, misguided by the
aristocratic haughtiness of his own time, and the prevailing tone of
selfish luxury which seems more peculiar to ours, as well as the
seductions of pleasure which are predominant in all, some amusement,
or even some advantage, might, I thought, be derived from the manner
in which I might bring the exertions of this civic Mentor to bear in
his pupil's behalf. I am, I own, no great believer in the moral
utility to be derived from fictitious compositions; yet, if in any
case a word spoken in season may be of advantage to a young person, it
must surely be when it calls upon him to attend to the voice of
principle and self-denial, instead of that of precipitate passion. I
could not, indeed, hope or expect to represent my prudent and
benevolent citizen in a point of view so interesting as that of the
peasant girl, who nobly sacrificed her family affections to the
integrity of her moral character. Still however, something I hoped
might be done not altogether unworthy the fame which George Heriot has
secured by the lasting benefits he has bestowed on his country.

It appeared likely, that out of this simple plot I might weave
something attractive; because the reign of James I., in which George
Heriot flourished, gave unbounded scope to invention in the fable,
while at the same time it afforded greater variety and discrimination
of character than could, with historical consistency, have been
introduced, if the scene had been laid a century earlier. Lady Mary
Wortley Montague has said, with equal truth and taste, that the most
romantic region of every country is that where the mountains unite
themselves with the plains or lowlands. For similiar reasons, it may
be in like manner said, that the most picturesque period of history is
that when the ancient rough and wild manners of a barbarous age are
just becoming innovated upon, and contrasted, by the illumination of
increased or revived learning, and the instructions of renewed or
reformed religion. The strong contrast produced by the opposition of
ancient manners to those which are gradually subduing them, affords
the lights and shadows necessary to give effect to a fictitious
narrative; and while such a period entitles the author to introduce
incidents of a marvellous and improbable character, as arising out of
the turbulent independence and ferocity, belonging to old habits of
violence, still influencing the manners of a people who had been so
lately in a barbarous state; yet, on the other hand, the characters
and sentiments of many of the actors may, with the utmost probability,
be described with great variety of shading and delineation, which
belongs to the newer and more improved period, of which the world has
but lately received the light.

The reign of James I. of England possessed this advantage in a
peculiar degree. Some beams of chivalry, although its planet had been
for some time set, continued to animate and gild the horizon, and
although probably no one acted precisely on its Quixotic dictates, men
and women still talked the chivalrous language of Sir Philip Sydney's
Arcadia; and the ceremonial of the tilt-yard was yet exhibited, though
it now only flourished as a Place de Carrousel. Here and there a high-
spirited Knight of the Bath, witness the too scrupulous Lord Herbert
of Cherbury, was found devoted enough to the vows he had taken, to
imagine himself obliged to compel, by the sword's-point, a fellow-
knight or squire to restore the top-knot of ribbon which he had stolen
from a fair damsel;[Footnote: See Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs.]
but yet, while men were taking each other's lives on such punctilios
of honour, the hour was already arrived when Bacon was about to teach
the world that they were no longer to reason from authority to fact,
but to establish truth by advancing from fact to fact, till they fixed
an indisputable authority, not from hypothesis, but from experiment.

The state of society in the reign of James I. was also strangely
disturbed, and the license of a part of the community was perpetually
giving rise to acts of blood and violence. The bravo of the Queen's
day, of whom Shakspeare has given us so many varieties, as Bardolph,
Nym, Pistol, Peto, and the other companions of Falstaff, men who had
their humours, or their particular turn of extravaganza, had, since
the commencement of the Low Country wars, given way to a race of
sworders, who used the rapier and dagger, instead of the far less
dangerous sword and buckler; so that a historian says on this subject,
"that private quarrels were nourished, but especially between the
Scots and English; and duels in every street maintained; divers sects
and peculiar titles passed unpunished and unregarded, as the sect of
the Roaring Boys, Bonaventors, Bravadors, Quarterors, and such like,
being persons prodigal, and of great expense, who, having run
themselves into debt, were constrained to run next into factions, to
defend themselves from danger of the law. These received countenance
from divers of the nobility; and the citizens, through lasciviousness
consuming their estates, it was like that the number [of these
desperadoes] would rather increase than diminish; and under these
pretences they entered into many desperate enterprizes, and scarce any
durst walk in the street after nine at night."[Footnote: history of
the First Fourteen Years of King James's Reign. See Somers's Tracts,
edited by Scott, vol. ii. p.266.]

The same authority assures us farther, that "ancient gentlemen, who
had left their inheritance whole and well furnished with goods and
chattels (having thereupon kept good houses) unto their sons, lived to
see part consumed in riot and excess, and the rest in possibility to
be utterly lost; the holy state of matrimony made but a May-game, by
which divers families had been subverted; brothel houses much
frequented, and even great persons, prostituting their bodies to the
intent to satisfy their lusts, consumed their substance in lascivious
appetites. And of all sorts, such knights and gentlemen, as either
through pride or prodigality--had consumed their substance, repairing
to the city, and to the intent to consume their virtue also, lived
dissolute lives; many of their ladies and daughters, to the intent to
maintain themselves according to their dignity, prostituting their
bodies in shameful manner. Ale-houses, dicing-houses, taverns, and
places of iniquity, beyond manner abounding in most places."

Nor is it only in the pages of a puritanical, perhaps a satirical
writer, that we find so shocking and disgusting a picture of the
coarseness of the beginning of the seventeenth century. On the
contrary, in all the comedies of the age, the principal character for
gaiety and wit is a young heir, who has totally altered the
establishment of the father to whom he has succeeded, and, to use the
old simile, who resembles a fountain, which plays off in idleness and
extravagance the wealth which its careful parents painfully had
assembled in hidden reservoirs.

And yet, while that spirit of general extravagance seemed at work over
a whole kingdom, another and very different sort of men were gradually
forming the staid and resolved characters, which afterwards displayed
themselves during the civil wars, and powerfully regulated and
affected the character of the whole English nation, until, rushing
from one extreme to another, they sunk in a gloomy fanaticism the
splendid traces of the reviving fine arts.

From the quotations which I have produced, the selfish and disgusting
conduct of Lord Dalgarno will not perhaps appear overstrained; nor
will the scenes in Whitefriars and places of similar resort seem too
highly coloured. This indeed is far from being the case. It was in
James I.'s reign that vice first appeared affecting the better classes
in its gross and undisguised depravity. The entertainments and
amusements of Elizabeth's time had an air of that decent restraint
which became the court of a maiden sovereign; and, in that earlier
period, to use the words of Burke, vice lost half its evil by being
deprived of all its grossness. In James's reign, on the contrary, the
coarsest pleasures were publicly and unlimitedly indulged, since,
according to Sir John Harrington, the men wallowed in beastly
delights; and even ladies abandoned their delicacy and rolled about in
intoxication. After a ludicrous account of a mask, in which the actors
had got drunk, and behaved themselves accordingly, he adds, "I have
much marvelled at these strange pageantries, and they do bring to my
recollection what passed of this sort in our Queen's days, in which I
was sometimes an assistant and partaker: but never did I see such lack
of good order and sobriety as I have now done. The gunpowder fright is
got out of all our heads, and we are going on hereabout as if the
devil was contriving every man should blow up himself by wild riot,
excess, and devastation of time and temperance. The great ladies do go
well masqued; and indeed, it be the only show of their modesty to
conceal their countenance, but alack, they meet with such countenance
to uphold their strange doings, that I marvel not at aught that
happens."[Footnote: Harrington's Nugae Antique, vol. ii. p. 352. For
the gross debauchery of the period, too much encouraged by the example
of the monarch, who was, in other respects, neither without talent nor
a good-natured disposition, see Winwood's Memorials, Howell's Letters,
and other Memorials of the time; but particularly, consult the Private
Letters and Correspondence of Steenie, _alias_ Buckingham, with his
reverend Dad and Gossip, King James, which abound with the grossest as
well as the most childish language. The learned Mr. D'Israeli, in an
attempt to vindicate the character of James, has only succeeded in
obtaining for himself the character of a skilful and ingenious
advocate, without much advantage to his royal client]

Such being the state of the court, coarse sensuality brought along
with it its ordinary companion, a brutal degree of undisguised
selfishness, destructive alike of philanthropy and good breeding; both
of which, in their several spheres, depend upon the regard paid by
each individual to the interest as well as the feelings of others. It
is in such a time that the heartless and shameless man of wealth and
power may, like the supposed Lord Dalgarno, brazen out the shame of
his villainies, and affect to triumph in their consequences, so long
as they were personally advantageous to his own pleasures or profit.

Alsatia is elsewhere explained as a cant name for Whitefriars, which,
possessing certain privileges of sanctuary, became for that reason a
nest of those mischievous characters who were generally obnoxious to
the law. These privileges were derived from its having been an
establishment of the Carmelites, or White Friars, founded says Stow,
in his Survey of London, by Sir Patrick Grey, in 1241. Edward I. gave
them a plot of ground in Fleet Street, to build their church upon. The
edifice then erected was rebuilt by Courtney, Earl of Devonshire, in
the reign of Edward. In the time of the Reformation the place retained
its immunities as a sanctuary, and James I. confirmed and added to
them by a charter in 1608. Shadwell was the first author who made some
literary use of Whitefriars, in his play of the Squire of Alsatia,
which turns upon the plot of the Adelphi of Terence.

In this old play, two men of fortune, brothers, educate two young men,
(sons to the one and nephews to the other,) each under his own
separate system of rigour and indulgence. The elder of the subjects of
this experiment, who has been very rigidly brought up, falls at once
into all the vices of the town, is debauched by the cheats and bullies
of Whitefriars, and, in a word, becomes the Squire of Alsatia. The
poet gives, as the natural and congenial inhabitants of the place,
such characters as the reader will find in the note. [Footnote:
"Cheatly, a rascal, who by reason of debts dares not stir out of
Whitefriars, but there inveigles young heirs of entail, and helps them
to goods and money upon great disadvantages, is bound for them, and
shares with them till he undoes them. A lewd, impudent, debauched
fellow, very expert in the cant about town.

"Shamwell, cousin to the Belfords, who, being ruined by Cheatly, is
made a decoy-duck for others, not daring to stir out of Alsatia, where
he lives. Is bound with Cheatly for heirs, and lives upon them a
dissolute debauched life.

"Captain Hackum, a blockheaded bully of Alsatia, a cowardly, impudent,
blustering fellow, formerly a sergeant in Flanders, who has run from
his colours, and retreated into Whitefriars for a very small debt,
where by the Alsatians he is dubb'd a captain, marries one that lets
lodgings, sells cherry-brandy, and is a bawd.

"Scrapeall a hypocritical, repeating, praying, psalm-singing, precise
fellow, pretending to great piety; a godly knave, who joins with
Cheatly, and supplies young heirs with goods, and money."--Dramatis
Personae to the Squire of Alsatia, SHADWELL'S Works, vol. iv.] The
play, as we learn from the dedication to the Earl of Dorset and
Middlesex, was successful above the author's expectations, "no comedy
these many years having filled the theatre so long together. And I had
the great honour," continues Shadwell, "to find so many friends, that
the house was never so full since it was built as upon the third day
of this play, and vast numbers went away that could not be admitted."
[Footnote: Dedication to the Squire of Alsatia, Shadwell's Works, vol.
iv.] From the Squire of Alsatia the author derived some few hints, and
learned the footing on which the bullies and thieves of the Sanctuary
stood with their neighbours, the fiery young students of the Temple,
of which some intimation is given in the dramatic piece.

Such are the materials to which the author stands indebted for the
composition of the Fortunes of Nigel, a novel, which may be perhaps
one of those that are more amusing on a second perusal, than when read
a first time for the sake of the story, the incidents of which are few
and meagre.

The Introductory Epistle is written, in Lucio's phrase, "according to
the trick," and would never have appeared had the writer meditated
making his avowal of the work. As it is the privilege of a masque or
incognito to speak in a feigned voice and assumed character, the
author attempted, while in disguise, some liberties of the same sort;
and while he continues to plead upon the various excuses which the
introduction contains, the present acknowledgment must serve as an
apology for a species of "hoity toity, whisky frisky" pertness of
manner, which, in his avowed character, the author should have
considered as a departure from the rules of civility and good taste.

ABBOTSFORD.
1st July, 1831.

INTRODUCTORY EPISTLE

CAPTAIN CLUTTERBUCK TO THE REVEREND
DR. DRYASDUST

DEAR SIR,

I readily accept of, and reply to the civilities with which you have
been pleased to honour me in your obliging letter, and entirely agree
with your quotation, of _"Quam bonum et quam jucundum!"_ We may indeed
esteem ourselves as come of the same family, or, according to our
country proverb, as being all one man's bairns; and there needed no
apology on your part, reverend and dear sir, for demanding of me any
information which I may be able to supply respecting the subject of
your curiosity. The interview which you allude to took place in the
course of last winter, and is so deeply imprinted on my recollection,
that it requires no effort to collect all its most minute details.

You are aware that the share which I had in introducing the Romance,
called THE MONASTERY, to public notice, has given me a sort of
character in the literature of our Scottish metropolis. I no longer
stand in the outer shop of our bibliopolists, bargaining for the
objects of my curiosity with an unrespective shop-lad, hustled among
boys who come to buy Corderies and copy-books, and servant girls
cheapening a pennyworth of paper, but am cordially welcomed by the
bibliopolist himself, with, "Pray, walk into the back-shop, Captain.
Boy, get a chair for Captain Clutterbuck. There is the newspaper,
Captain--to-day's paper;" or, "Here is the last new work--there is a
folder, make free with the leaves;" or, "Put it in your pocket and
carry it home;" or, "We will make a bookseller of you, sir, and you
shall have it at trade price." Or, perhaps if it is the worthy
trader's own publication, his liberality may even extend itself to--
"Never mind booking such a trifle to _you_, sir--it is an over-copy.
Pray, mention the work to your reading friends." I say nothing of the
snug well-selected literary party arranged round a turbot, leg of
five-year-old mutton, or some such gear, or of the circulation of a
quiet bottle of Robert Cockburn's choicest black--nay, perhaps, of his
new ones. All these are comforts reserved to such as are freemen of
the corporation of letters, and I have the advantage of enjoying them
in perfection. But all things change under the sun; and it is with no
ordinary feelings of regret, that, in my annual visits to the
metropolis, I now miss the social and warm-hearted welcome of the
quick-witted and kindly friend who first introduced me to the public;
who had more original wit than would have set up a dozen of professed
sayers of good things, and more racy humour than would have made the
fortune of as many more. To this great deprivation has been added, I
trust for a time only, the loss of another bibliopolical friend, whose
vigorous intellect, and liberal ideas, have not only rendered his
native country the mart of her own literature, but established there a
Court of Letters, which must command respect, even from those most
inclined to dissent from many of its canons. The effect of these
changes, operated in a great measure by the strong sense and sagacious
calculations of an individual, who knew how to avail himself, to an
unhoped-for extent, of the various kinds of talent which his country
produced, will probably appear more clearly to the generation which
shall follow the present.

I entered the shop at the Cross, to enquire after the health of my
worthy friend, and learned with satisfaction, that his residence in
the south had abated the rigour of the symptoms of his disorder.
Availing myself, then, of the privileges to which I have alluded, I
strolled onward in that labyrinth of small dark rooms, or _crypts_, to
speak our own antiquarian language, which form the extensive back-
settlements of that celebrated publishing-house. Yet, as I proceeded
from one obscure recess to another, filled, some of them with old
volumes, some with such as, from the equality of their rank on the
shelves, I suspected to be the less saleable modern books of the
concern, I could not help feeling a holy horror creep upon me, when I
thought of the risk of intruding on some ecstatic bard giving vent to
his poetical fury; or it might be, on the yet more formidable privacy
of a band of critics, in the act of worrying the game which they had
just run down. In such a supposed case, I felt by anticipation the
horrors of the Highland seers, whom their gift of deuteroscopy compels
to witness things unmeet for mortal eye; and who, to use the
expression of Collins,

----"heartless, oft, like moody madness, stare,
To see the phantom train their secret work prepare."

Still, however, the irresistible impulse of an undefined curiosity
drove me on through this succession of darksome chambers, till, like
the jeweller of Delhi in the house of the magician Bennaskar, I at
length reached a vaulted room, dedicated to secrecy and silence, and
beheld, seated by a lamp, and employed in reading a. blotted _revise_,
[Footnote: The uninitiated must be informed, that a second proof-sheet
is so called.] the person, or perhaps I should rather say the Eidolon,
or representative Vision of the AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY! You will not be
surprised at the filial instinct which enabled me at once to
acknowledge the features borne by this venerable apparition, and that
I at once bended the knee, with the classical salutation of, _Salve,
magne parens!_ The vision, however, cut me short, by pointing to a
seat, intimating at the same time, that my presence was not expected,
and that he had something to say to me.

I sat down with humble obedience, and endeavoured to note the features
of him with whom I now found myself so unexpectedly in society. But on
this point I can give your reverence no satisfaction; for, besides the
obscurity of the apartment, and the fluttered state of my own nerves,
I seemed to myself overwhelmed by a sense of filial awe, which
prevented my noting and recording what it is probable the personage
before me might most desire to have concealed. Indeed, his figure was
so closely veiled and wimpled, either with a mantle, morning-gown, or
some such loose garb, that the verses of Spenser might well have been
applied--

"Yet, certes, by her face and physnomy,
Whether she man or woman only were,
That could not any creature well descry."

I must, however, go on as I have begun, to apply the masculine gender;
for, notwithstanding very ingenious reasons, and indeed something like
positive evidence, have been offered to prove the Author of Waverley
to be two ladies of talent, I must abide by the general opinion, that
he is of the rougher sex. There are in his writings too many things

"Quae maribus sola tribuuntur,"

to permit me to entertain any doubt on that subject. I will proceed,
in the manner of dialogue, to repeat as nearly as I can what passed
betwixt us, only observing, that in the course of the conversation, my
timidity imperceptibly gave way under the familiarity of his address;
and that, in the concluding part of our dialogue, I perhaps argued
with fully as much confidence as was beseeming.

_Author of Waverley._ I was willing to see you, Captain Clutterbuck,
being the person of my family whom I have most regard for, since the
death of Jedediah Cleishbotham; and I am afraid I may have done you
some wrong, in assigning to you The Monastery as a portion of my
effects. I have some thoughts of making it up to you, by naming you
godfather to this yet unborn babe--(he indicated the proof-sheet with
his finger)--But first, touching The Monastery--How says the world--
you are abroad and can learn?