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,