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Updated: June 24, 2025
I wish I had thought of it before correcting that beastly border essay. Naboclish! June 25. Wrote five pages of the Chronicles, and hope to conquer one or two more ere night to fetch up the leeway. Went and saw Allan's sketch of a picture for Abbotsford, which is promising; a thing on the plan of Watteau.
I had spent the night of the 27th at Burke's camp, on Boottara; my horses faring decently for the season. Burke, the regular station-contractor, had been off work for a month, keeping his twenty horses and twenty-four bullocks in the Abbotsford Paddock, and watering them daily at Granger's Tank.
A visit to Abbotsford, urged upon us most kindly, is one of the lost opportunities of my life that I think of always with bitter regret.
"Should you think of writing to let me know how the distressed family are, you may direct, during the beginning of next week, to Drumlanrig, Thornhill, Dumfriesshire. "My kind love attends my dear Mrs. Skene, girls, boys, and all the family, and I am, always yours, "ABBOTSFORD, 18th September ." Much Ado about Nothing, Act III. Sc. 5. 1 King Henry IV., Act III. Sc. 1.
After Scott had become world-famous, his happiest hours were spent in enlarging and adorning his land at Abbotsford, and in erecting and embellishing his baronial castle. In this his gains were more than absorbed. He loved that castle more than any of his intellectual creations, and it was not completed until nearly all his novels were written.
Yet there are sad drawbacks so far as family comfort is concerned. To-day is Sunday, when they always dined with us, and generally met a family friend or two, but we are no longer to expect them. In the country, where their little cottage was within a mile or two of Abbotsford, we shall miss their society still more, for Chiefswood was the perpetual object of our walks, rides, and drives.
"A cold and chilly mist Broodeth o'er Winandermere, And the heaven-descended cloud hath kissed The still lake drear." I had already tried to paint lake scenery, in copying a picture, and my favorite illustrations in the Abbotsford edition of Scott's works were the lochs that I was now to see for the first time.
But Lockhart's allegation clearly is that they were so used as to charge Scott's estate to the extent of forty shillings in the pound. John Ballantyne had died in 1821, before the mischief was punished, but after it was done. Lockhart, vii. 370, 371. I am not certain whether the second advance, which was secured by mortgage on Abbotsford, included the first or not. Probably it did.
I thrill to see the stately rooms of Abbotsford, with all their sham feudal decorations, the little staircase by which Scott stole away to his solitary work, the folded clothes, the shapeless hat, the ugly shoes, laid away in the glass case; the plantations where he walked with his shrewd bailiff, the place where he stopped so often on the shoulder of the slope, to look at the Eildon Hills, the rooms where he sat, a broken and bereaved man, yet with so gallant a spirit, to wrestle with sorrow and adversity.
There is pathos in the recollection that just ten years later when Scott lay in his study at Abbotsford the strength of that noble mind slowly ebbing away the very passage in The Borough just quoted was one of those he asked to have read to him.
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