The Thirty fourth Annual Dinner

 

THE ANNUAL DINNER of the Club was held in the North British Station Hotel on Friday, 24th Novem­ber 1933, when the Honourable Lord St Vigeans presided over a company of 250.

 

LORD ST VIGEANS, in proposing "The Memory of Sir Walter Scott," said:­---

The toast I have now the honour to commend for your acceptance is "The Memory of Sir Walter Scott." In applying myself to this task I am sadly conscious that I am neither Hamlet nor the Prince of Denmark, but only masquerading as a poor player like Bottom, the Weaver, because, but for the exigencies of the services of the Empire, the Marquess of Linlithgow would have occupied this chair to-night, and I doubt not would have charmed you with all the graceful eloquence of a gentleman and a scholar.

It is indeed of verity that it is not given to every one to tread the golden road to Samarkand, and if perchance the mischievous goblin page of the "Lay" should whisper the words of Sir Walter himself, which Cuddie Headrigg applied to Gabriel Kettledrummle, as "routing like a cow in a fremit loaning," I should call to my aid the advice of Sir Mungo Malagrowther in the " Fortunes of Nigel," and simply "jouk and let the jaw gae bye." Nevertheless, I take courage from the observation of an old friend of mine, who had the misfortune to be an Englishman-a mere Sassenach -who said, "Although I cannot express myself in the fine language in which you Scotsmen have glorified your dear loved Walter Scott, I will yield to none of you in my admira­tion of his genius, or in my gratitude for the many delightful hours he has given me throughout the course of a long life." If, therefore, my discourse be not "touched to fine issues," I trust it may, at least, be a tribute of sincerity and appreciation.

During the year of Scott's centenary, which is just past, you have been listening to the roaring of the cataract as to the noise of many waters, and you have heard an impetuous spate of oratory. These forces are now spent, leaving behind them many notable pronouncements on Scott's life and work. But you must now be content to meander in pensive mood along the banks of the placid stream, amid quiet pastures and meadows trim with daisies pied.

Many and diverse are the avenues by which one may approach the contemplation of Scott and his works. But I only desire, as an ardent lover of Scott, to speak to you, who are his admirers, in the spirit of those who regard his creations as the prized playthings of their imaginations, and to invite you to wander with me, for a short time, in those pleasant realms of fancy which he has conjured up, as with a wizard wand, out of the wonderland of the past, and which have refreshed our souls amid the welter of modern life with the healing waters of fantasy.

It is indeed a labour of Hercules, albeit a labour of love, to attempt to call up as from the vasty deep-the dark backward and abysm of time---the spirit of the Great Unknown.

 

For his spirit haunts this room to-night,

A mingled form of mist and light

From that far Coast.

 

Welcome beneath this roof of ours,

Welcome, the vacant chair is yours,

Dear Guest and Ghost.

 

If ever the famous adage of Shakespeare was true, "that there is a divinity that shapes our ends rough hew them how we will," it was so in the case of Walter Scott. Step by step, from the time he left the benches of the High School, his lifework seemed to unroll itself naturally, stage by stage, although, no doubt, at every step it was his own genius, his own determination, and his own colossal industry which en­abled him to grasp and make the most of every opportunity. In the whole of his early life the predilections of his mind manifested themselves, and unconsciously launched him on the career which he ultimately followed. It was only a natural sequence that the boy who invented tales to amuse his schoolfellows, round Luckie Brown's fireside, should develop into the consummate story-teller, with the flair of an Icelandic Scald and with the civilised world for his audience.

In Scotland, the latter half of the eighteenth century, part of which covered Scott's youth, had been an era of great literary awakening, and of eager questing into the origin and nature of the material, the intellectual, and the spiritual world. Scott may be said to have inherited the traditional connection between the Bar and literature which had been laid in the previous generation by such men as Lord Kames, Lord Hailes, and Lord Monboddo. These men may have been an inspiration to Scott. But their contribu­tions had been excusable in the eyes of their world as being on the higher plane of philosophical and metaphysical speculations which made for the advancement and extension of human knowledge. It was a new and daring departure for a member of the Bar to indulge either in the "vain and unprofitable art of poem-making" or the still less reputable art of writing novels. The scorn with which such pursuits were regarded is expressed by Saunders Fairford in "Red­gauntlet," when he says of Darsie Latimer--- "Unstable as water, he shall not excel, or as the Septuagint hath it, Effusa est sicut aqua, non crescat. He goeth to dancing houses and readeth novels. Sat est." He adds, "He reads the idle trash, which the author should have been scourged for, twenty times over." Such was the prejudice Scott had to overcome, and how gloriously he did it.

A little law is a dangerous thing. But it is too often forgotten that Scott was by training and habit a lawyer. It is impossible to get a complete view of Scott's mental outlook without taking into consideration his law and legal associations. Literature has claimed him as her child. But these legal associations and ways of thinking were part of the fibre of his being, and had an indefinable influence on his mental processes. By force of circumstances he was a lawyer---by choice and predilection he was the Minstrel of the Scottish Border and the accomplished master of the historical romance. The two threads of law and Border tradition were co-mingled in his youth, and it was a question for a long time which should predominate, for by heredity he was a child of both.

Though Scott early abandoned the active life of a practising advocate, he never lost his love of Scots law, or his interest in the development and illustration of legal principles. His position as Clerk of Session kept him in touch with it in its highest form, and gave him the opportun­ity of contemplating it from that placid and philosophical angle which enabled him to enshrine its principles in a more picturesque and universal form than any judge could do. He was a competent and an erudite lawyer. The law ran through his life like a golden thread and provided him with a wealth of illustration and incident, which he wove into some of the most fascinating passages of his writings. Without his keen instinct as a lawyer, and his admiration and veneration for the abstruse doctrines and quaint phraseology of Scots law, many of his novels would have lost much of their lustre as a revelation of Scottish life and character. Could we imagine the novels of Sir Walter Scott without his ingenious application of the law? God forbid. But for that, at least five of his great books-"Waverley," "Guy Mannering," "The Heart of Midlothian," "The Antiquary," and "Redgauntlet"---would have been drab and commonplace, or more probably would not have been written at all.

It is difficult to explain Scott's want of success at the Bar, except on the view that any forecast is incalculable, for he seemed to have all the qualities which go to make for such success---strong common sense, a sound knowledge of law, a retentive memory, inordinate industry, a logical sense of facts and a power of marshalling them in attractive form, and also a gift of speech, of which he showed a complete mastery in his appearances in later life when he spoke on general subjects. But it may be that there is much signifi­cance in his observation that when he was offered work at his first Jedburgh Circuit, he confesses "he durst not venture." Scott expressed the feeling admirably when he painted Lord Bladderskate's nephew in "Redgauntlet," who fled to the country rather than attempt to appear before the "Fifteen" to open the voluminous and overlaid process of Poor Peter Peebles v. Plainstanes, and thus gave Alan Fairford his golden opportunity which he incontinently threw away. An extensive search through the twenty-four volumes of Morison's Dictionary reveals very few cases in which Scott acted as Counsel. But there were two at least, and these were significant in character. One suited his antiquarian tastes and concerned multures or astricted mill dues of the Monastery of Paisley under a Charter of 1490, and must have involved an investigation into the thirlage of invecta et illata, sucken, sequels, knaveship, lock and gowpen, which he afterwards used to illustrate the delight­ful character of Hob Miller in "The Monastery." The other reflected the then somewhat free-drinking habits of his beloved Borders. It concerned a large sale of sheep by a party in liquor, which was held invalid on that ground. The alleged bargain is quaintly set out as 15/- per sheep for all that could rise and run and were not diseased. Scott must have enjoyed the proof, which revealed a royal carouse which continued for several days, and may have inspired some of the Saturnalia he afterwards described, or the more moderate Caenae, or Suppers of the Ancients, which he says Lord Monboddo loved, and in which he himself participated.

Professor Masson in his address to this Club so long ago as 1896 said, "If I had the wish which Xerxes is said to have had, to decree the invention of a new pleasure in life, it would be a perpetual succession of Waverley Novels." But among the riches of those which already exist the choice is be­wildering enough, for Scott, by the confession of all com­petent authorities save a very few, has created more men and women undoubtedly real and life-like than any other prose novelist. Nowhere out of Shakespeare is there such a gallery so varied, so delightful, so instinct with life. After the Bible, Scott is one of the few writers who does not stale by famili­arity, so rich, so full blooded, breathing the vital essence of humanity.

Thinking men, at least of our generation, are constrained to admit that he captured our youthful imaginations with his heroic tales of chivalry and the deeds of bold spirits like Hal o' the Wynd, the sturdy Armourer of Perth. He taught our maturer years to revel in characters like Dominie Sampson, Jonathan Oldbuck, Colonel Mannering, Councillor Pleydell, Jeanie Deans, Di Vernon, and a host of others. In the evening of life he enables us to renew the enthusiasms of our youth, and provides a whole galaxy of figures around whom our affections twine with never failing delight.

If I were to choose one representative novel in which he elucidates Scottish character, its staunchness, its whimsi­calities, its pathos, its humour, and its essential lovableness, I should take "The Antiquary." Of all his creations it was his own favourite. That is not surprising, for its characters reflect his own tastes in many ways, and exemplify many traits of his own disposition.

Jonathan Oldbuck, of ever happy memory, is a lovable, if garrulous, gentleman of the old Scottish school. He instinctively grips the imagination from the moment he enters upon the stage, with his folio under his arm, in his humorous squabble with the pawky Scotch wifie, Mrs Mac­leuchar, at her laigh shop in the High Street, through his journey to Queensferry, with occasional excursions to Roman camps and dissertations on castramentation, and his by-play with mine host of the Hawes Inn, who thought a man was aye the better thocht o' who had been afore the "Fifteen," until he arrives at the wonderful library at 1lonkbarns with its bewildering and heterogeneous collection of curiosities, followed by his dissertation on the Kaim of Kinprunes and the awkward revelation of Aiken Drum's Lang Ladle.

Add to this the pathos and sturdy independence of Mucklebackit, the old fisherman, and the shrewdness and dignified poverty of the Blue Gown bedesman, Edie Ochil­tree, and the whole presents a typical picture of a phase of Scottish society in the end of the eighteenth century, which allures by its fidelity and fascinates by its picturesqueness.

One observation of Edie Ochiltree is characteristic. Witness his stoic philosophy in the great scene at the Cliffs of Arbroath, "I hae lived to be weary o' life. But here or yonder, at the back o' a dyke, in a wreath o' snaw, or in the wame o' a wave, what signifies how the gaberlunzie dies?"

"Guy Mannering" was mostly written in a month and completed in six weeks. Think of it, gentlemen. What have we done in the last month to compare with the creation of all these characters, the feeble and tyrannical Ellangowan, the fiery witch Meg Merrilies, the sturdy Dandle Dinmont, the sleek lawyer Glossin, the ferocious Dick Hatteraick, and the whimsical and upright Councillor Pleydell-a delightful series of characters all flowing spontaneously and red-hot from his brain?

But even in what must have been an impetuous rush of thought, he strikes a high note in the dramatic speech of Meg Merrilies to the crestfallen Ellangowan-Meg Merrilies who had gathered the fern seed, and who there gives the keynote to the central theme underlying the whole story of the novel-the hand of Fate guiding the destinies of man­kind and meting out the justice of retribution.

"Ride your ways," said the gipsy, "ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram! This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths; see if the fire in your ain parlour burn the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack off seven cottar houses; look if your ain roof-tree stand the faster. Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings of Derncleuch; see that the hare does not couch on the hearthstane at Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram. What do ye glower after our folk for? There's thirty hearts there that wad hae wanted bread ere ye had wanted sunkets, and spent their life-blood ere ye had scratched your finger. Yes; there's thirty yonder, from the auld wife of an hundred to the babe that was born last week, that ye hae turned out o' their bit o' bields, to sleep with the tod and the blackcock in the muirs! Ride your ways, Ellangowan. Our bairns are hinging at our weary backs ; look that your brave cradle at Name be the fairer spread up ; not that I'm wishing ill to little Harry or to the babe that's yet to be born---God forbid---and make them kind to the poor, and better folk than their father! And now, ride e'en your ways; for these are the last words yell ever hear Meg Merrilies speak, and that is the last reise I'll ever cut from the bonny woods o' Ellangowan."

So saying, she broke the sapling she held in her hand and flung it into the road. The groom, recounting the story afterwards to the kitchen, concluded by swearing, "that if ever the Devil spoke by the mouth of a woman, he had spoken by that of Meg Merrilies that blessed day." Verrall says of that passage, "What wonder the world sat up to listen.... Here, Scott's craft is supreme, good enough for Racine, Euripides, or the Homer of the Ninth Iliad."

To suggest preferences among Scott's novels is a kittle occupation. You all have your own notions, and the fluctua­tions of taste prove that Scott, like Cervantes, is for the learned and the unlearned, the critical and the uncritical. But, with that inborn love of eternal youth, I am free to confess to what in these modern and sophisticated days is considered a boyish and debased taste, when I have the courage to put "Ivanhoe" high among the novels to which one recurs with interest and enthusiasm. The youthful fire and spirit which pervade "Ivanhoe" are all the more re­markable when we reflect that much of it was composed when sickness and failing powers pressed heavily upon the wearied brain, and the good right hand was stricken with incapacity-that good right hand which so fascinated the spectator travelling over page after page, night after night, in 39 Castle Street.

But yet through it all you hear the trumpet call which allured Sir Galahad in search of the Holy Grail---the very Spirit of Romance­---

 

My good blade carves the casques of men,

My tough lance thrusteth sure,

My strength is as the strength of ten

Because my heart is pure.

 

The shattering trumpet shrilleth high,

The hard brands shiver on the steel,

The splintered spear shafts crack and fly,

The horse and rider reel.

 

They reel, they roll in clanging lists,

And when the tide of combat stands,

Perfume and flowers fall in showers

That lightly rain from ladies' hands.

 

How sweet are looks that ladies bend

On whom their favours fall,

For them I battle till the end

To save from shame and thrall.

 

That was the chivalry of Sir Walter Scott.

But perhaps Scott got closer to the heart of the Scottish peasantry and drew their characters with more knowledge and insight than any other, set off as it is by his admirable use of dialect and that great fund of humour without which no man was ever a great philosopher or a true historian of manners or character. With what a kindly hand did Scott allow his humour to play around his characters, and enliven this drab world with the wonderful fairy touch of his lively and laughter-loving fancy. Andrew Fairservice, in "Rob Roy," is a typical example with his caustic humour, his religiosity, and his keen sense of his own worth.

"I have been fighting with the beasts of Ephesus for the best part of these four and twenty years, as sure as my name's Andrew Fairservice.

"To speak truth I hae been flitting every term these four and twenty years, but when the term comes there is aye something to saw that I wad like to see sawn-or some­thing to maw I wad like to see maven, or something to ripe I wad like to see ripen---and sae I e'en daiker on wi' the family frae year's end to year's end. And I wad say for certain that I'm gaun to quit at Canelmas, only I was just as positive on it twenty years sync, and I aye find mysel turning o'er the mouls here for a' that!

"But if your Honour wad wush me to ony place where I wad hear pure doctrine, and hae a free cow's gress, and a cot and a yard, and mair than ten punds annual fee and bountith, and whaur there's nae Teddy to count the apples, I'se haud mysel muckle indebted to you."

How many delightful creations has he of that type, whose humour is enshrined in rich expressive dialect, of which no man ever made better or more appropriate use. There is Bartoline Saddletree, with his " brogging an elshin, through bend leather"; Cuddie Headrigg, with his adage, "It's ill sittin' at Rome and striving with the Pope" ; Jock Jabos, as he described himself, " a little feckless body, fit for naething but the outside o' a saddle and the fore-end o' a poschay." Then there are Davie Gellatley, Richie Moniplies, and most pathetic and most heroic of them all, Bessie Maclure, the lone bereaved widow in "Old Mortality."

Among the charms of Scott must be reckoned his sane and healthy outlook on life, the breezy freshness of his descriptions of scenery, his rich and gawky humour, the truth and individuality of his character, his wealth of apt illustration, and the purity and candour of his morality. He truly boasted that he never penned a line of which he needed to be ashamed. Over all his characters he has spread the glow of a manly mind. One of his great assets was his loving kindness. He looked upon the world with a loving eye, seeing the good and doing it. An observer of the last meeting between Byron and Scott said, "How I did stare at the beautiful pale face of Byron, like a spirit's---angel or fiend. But he was bitter; what a contrast to Scott, full of geniality, good humour, and anecdote."

Further, one cannot fail to recognise what a wonderful scholar he was, for all through life, he drank greedily at the wells of human knowledge.

 

And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew

That one small head could carry all he knew.

 

Like Wilfred in " Rokeby,"

 

Hour after hour, he loved to pore

On Shakespeare's rich and varied lore.

 

His schools and schoolmasters were the wide world and all the accumulated lore of past generations, and, in writing, he only needed to draw upon his inexhaustible fund of read­ing and experience. As it has been expressed by an acute mind, "Years of training, now among books, now in the walks of men, had wrought the sensitive ear and brain to such consummate readiness, that when the call came the pen ran headlong, without a trip, and, at the utmost speed, put in strokes which challenge the microscope. Yet withal, his novels have caught and held the world. There is stuff in the weakest and many of them are works of Art."

The realms through which his fancy roved were vast and comprehensive. He painted on a broad and spacious canvas, depicting life in all its varied colours, with a just sense of proportion and perspective, and with the firm belief that there is beauty and good alike in nature and humanity (if we care to seek it), and a just and wise principle ruling over all.

What I might call the pageantry of Sir Walter Scott is something impossible to depict with any hope of doing it justice.

There you see Catherine Seyton in her green wimple gliding down one of the closes of the High Street. There you see douce Davie Deans with bowed head in the High Court of Justiciary, exclaiming, "Na, na, my bairn is no like the widow of Tekoah, nae man has putten words into her mouth." There again is Quentin Durward of Glen Houlakin, braving the Boar of Ardennes in the Castle of Schonwaldt after the murder of the good Bishop of Liege. There is the deadly fight of the clans on the North Inch of Perth, and the brave foster-father exclaiming, "another for Hector," and. the dastardly flight of the craven Conachar. Anon you see Bailie Nicol Jarvie making use of a most unchivalrous weapon---a red-hot poker---in the fight at the Clachan of Aberfoyle. Again you make acquaintance with Magnus Troil, the Udaller, and Minna and Brenda, and Norna of the Fitful Head in far-off Shetland. There is the Rittmaster Dugald Dalgetty, loaded with all the learning of Marischal College, traversing the banks of Loch Lubnaig, and daring the pride of M'Callum More in his own Castle of Inveraray. There is the tragic figure of Lucy Ashton defying the decrees of fate like a heroine of Greek tragedy, and the no less tragic figure of Amy Robsart, done to death in Cumnor Place. Then comes Hob Miller, in "The Monastery," to discourse learnedly on his multures and sequels, knaveships and gowpens, followed by Poor Peter Peebles with his multitudinous processes and his taste for brandy, and his supreme contempt for the writers of Carlisle, who did not even know the mean­ing of a multiplepoinding. From the Law Courts of Edin­burgh to the Court of the wise fool, Jamie the Sixth, with Babie Charles and Jingling Geordie. From the moorlands of Charlie's Hope, the gude wife and the bairns and the dogs, to the burning sands of the desert and all the pomp and jealousy of the Crusaders' Camp before Acre. From the sturdy tenacity of his rights of Dandie Dinmont, with his boundary "where wind and water shears," to the testy and touchy but courageous knight errantry of Richard Couur de Lion. Anon you have the shrewd common sense of Meg Dods, the dignified devotion of Flora MacIvor and Di Vernon to a lost cause, and the courage and self-sacrifice of Jeanie Deans for a sister's life. Anon you see the debonair but ruthless Clavers at the head of his hard-riding dragoons, the great Marquis of Montrose pursuing the devious course of his campaign amid the wilds of the Highlands, and lastly the stricken Master of Ravenswood riding to woo a dead

maiden for his bride, and finding his fate in the Kelpie's Flow.

To do justice to the novels of Sir Walter Scott and all the fine play of life and character which they unroll before our eyes, one would verily have to

 

Call up him, who left half told

The story of Cambuscan bold.

 

In bidding adieu to all these pictures, we may say with Prospero---

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, are all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air.

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

 

But at the same time, perhaps the greatest romance which Scott ever created, was his own life, which he carved out of the Book of Fate. His life was rounded off with tragedy, not altogether of his own making. All his fair dreams were shattered, and he was engulfed in a dark cloud of calamity. But to the last, he never repined, never faltered, but set himself with unflinching determination to win out with honour, and that too when failing powers well-nigh seemed to appal even his stout heart-that stout heart which well became a scion of the Bold Buccleuch.

As he himself had sung­---

 

No thought was there of dastard flight,

 

even though we may consider it was "a fatal venture of mistaken chivalry."

Two scenes in his life bespeak the perfervid spirit of the man.

There you see him, with the massive brow and halting gait, and listen to his buirdly speech as he comes down the Mound with Jeffrey, after a discussion in the Faculty about some proposed innovations. Jeffrey tried to laugh off the differences. Scott, much moved and with tears in his eyes, said, "No, no, it is no laughing matter. Little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and under­mine, until nothing of what makes Scotland, Scotland, shall remain."

The other is the scene at the opening of the chest con­taining the Regalia of Scotland, when some Philistine, lost to all idea of the solemnity of the occasion, and with a crude notion of humour, made as if to put upon a young lady's head the Ancient Crown of Scotland, which was to Scott the symbol of her sovereignty and her traditions, and was stopped by the sight of Scott's face, white with passion, and his involuntary exclamation---"No, by God!"

You have heard many of the tributes paid to Scott in 1932, one hundred years after his death. Listen to what was said by one of his contemporaries in the Spectator in July 1832, two months before his death (and I think that this fugitive piece should find a place in the annals of your Club)­---

 

"The author of 'Waverley,' alas, is lying at St James Hotel, Jermyn Street, in the last stage of para­lysis-'past cure, past hope, past help.' In a few days the country will mourn the extinction of one of her most shining lights, the loss of one of her greatest benefactors. A personal enemy he never had. His unaffected sym­pathy, his benevolence of heart, his integrity of spirit have made him the object of universal affection as well as respect. He is not permitted to revisit the cherished scenes and ` familiar faces ' of his native land, but his memory will never die, and if ever a man bequeathed to posterity a name as pure and spotless as it is great, that man is Sir Walter Scott."

 

Burns had said it too­---

But deep the truth impressed my mind

Through all his works abroad,

The heart benevolent and kind

The most resembles God.

 

Fortunately, the writer's anticipation that he would not see again those scenes which he loved so well was falsified by later events, and Scott was able to be transported to his beloved Abbotsford, where he died with the murmur of the Tweed in his ears-that stream which was dearer to him than the smooth sliding Mincius or any of the classic rivers of the world.

Thus died a noble Scotsman, who has shed glory and fame on his native land beyond all others. As he said in one of the Introductions to "Marmion" of another benefactor to his country, the Younger Pitt­---

 

Now is the stately column broke,

The beacon light is quenched in smoke,

The trumpet's silver sound is still,

The warder silent on the hill.

 

In the best sense of Chaucer's description---

­

He was a veray parfait, gentil Knight,

 

but I may add, God made him a Gentleman, the King made him a Knight.

Douglas, Bell the Cat, could truly say­---

 

Thanks to St Bothan, son of mine

Save Gawain, ne'er could pen a line,

 

and yet Scott painted his own portrait in the exalted senti­ment which he put into the mouth of Douglas, when he said­---

 

My castles are my King's alone,

From turret to foundation stone.

The hand of Douglas is his own

And never shall in friendly grasp

The hand of such as Marmion clasp.

 

There spoke the man of high ideals. It crystallises in a sentence Scott's utter scorn of all things base and vile, and it is crowned by the beautiful epitaph pronounced on him in his last days­---

 

The Gentleman survived the Genius,

 

or as Thomas Carlyle characteristically said: "A sounder piece of British humanity was not put together in that eighteenth century of time."

Therefore, as he said of Burns, so let us say of Walter Scott, for all that he has said and done for Scotland, and for the joy that he has given to countless thousands­

 

Long life to thy fame,

And peace to thy soul.

 

There is an old story in the Saga of Gisli, the Outlaw, which seems to me to be appropriate to an occasion like this. Thorgrim was slain, as many another Scandinavian was in the ninth or tenth century, in a blood feud. He was buried in his ship with his arms beside him to serve him in the Halls of Asgard. The hell shoon were bound securely on his feet, according to established ritual, to carry him over the rough road that leadeth to Valhalla, and the earth was heaped upon his burial howe. In after years it was noticed that even in that Arctic climate one side of his howe was always green, and in later centuries the Sagaman, with true poetic instinct, explained the seeming phenomenon by saying that Frey, the Sun God, so loved the soul of Thorgrim that he would never allow any frost or snow to come between them, to chill the warmth of their affection.

It is in that spirit of affection that I ask you to drink to "The Memory of Sir Walter Scott" in solemn silence.

 

The Hon. Lord St. Vigeans

 

 The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club.

www.eswsc.com

 

 

Scanned from the original 1933 Bulletin and converted with into a word document with OCR software

by Lee A. Simpson in May 2006.

Complete transcript of the proceedings available upon request.

lee@walterscottclub.org.uk