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Updated: June 7, 2025
It was the first time Ballantrae had visited that wine-seller's, the first time he had seen the wife; and his eyes were true to her. 'I perceive your reason for carrying me to this very draughty tavern, he said at last. 'I believe it is propinquity, returned Balmile. 'You play dark, said Ballantrae, 'but have a care! Be more frank with me, or I will cut you out.
Things went extremely better with our designs, and Ballantrae kept his lead, to my admiration, from that day forth. I would be tempted to suppose that a gentleman must everywhere be first, even aboard a rover: but my birth is every whit as good as any Scottish lord's, and I am not ashamed to confess that I stayed Crowding Pat until the end, and was not much better than the crew's buffoon.
This was the Master of Ballantrae, my Lord Durrisdeer's son, a young nobleman of the rarest gallantry and parts, and equally designed by nature to adorn a Court and to reap laurels in the field. Our meeting was the more welcome to both, as he was one of the few Scots who had used the Irish with consideration, and as he might now be of very high utility in aiding my escape.
"At last, here you are!" he cried in French. "I thought I was to miss you altogether." The Scotsmen rose, and Ballantrae, after the first greetings, laid his hand on his companion's shoulder. "My lord," said he, "allow me to present to you one of my best friends and one of our best soldiers, the Lord Viscount Gladsmuir." The two bowed with the elaborate elegance of the period.
But there is nothing in which the Scotch are more piercing and poetical, I might say more perfect, than in their Scotch wickedness. It is what makes the Master of Ballantrae the most thrilling of all fictitious villains. It is what makes the Master of Lovat the most thrilling of all historical villains. It is poetry.
The value of rendering it as somebody's narrative, of placing it in the mouth of a man who was there on the spot, is in this book the value of working the drama into a picture, of passing it through a man's thought and catching his reflection of it. As the picture in Esmond is enhanced, so the drama in Ballantrae is toned and qualified by the method of presentation.
"My dear man," said I, "who thinks of the arms? But, to be sure, we must remember our friends. They will be close upon our heels, perhaps the Prince himself, and if the ship be gone, a great number of valuable lives may be imperilled." "The captain and the crew have lives also, if you come to that," says Ballantrae. "Frank," says he, "remember our bargain.
To say in the first flush of affection and enjoyment that 'A Window in Thrums' is as good as Sir Walter, or that 'The Master of Ballantrae' is better, is not to exercise the faculty of a critic; but it is not monstrous or absurd. It is the expression of a momentary happy ebullience, a natural ejaculation of gratitude for a beautiful gift.
Into the wine-shop there came a French gentleman, arrayed in the last refinement of the fashion, though a little tumbled by his passage in the wind. It was to be judged he had come from the same formal gathering at which the others had preceded him; and perhaps that he had gone there in the hope to meet with them, for he came up to Ballantrae with unceremonious eagerness.
Yet it ought to be very easy to distinguish a novel that may be dramatized from a novel that may not. Certain scenes in novelistic literature, like the duel in "The Master of Ballantrae," are essentially dramatic both in content and in mood. Such scenes may be adapted with very little labor to the uses of the theater.
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