SCOTT AND THE BORDER.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19048, 19 December 1923, Page 11

SCOTT AND THE BORDER.

ROMANCE THAT LIVES. Visiting the border country associated with Scott’s romances, Mr Stephen Gwynn, an Irishman, found that Scotland was truly the Lund of Cakes. “Not in any house known to me,” ho writes in “Blackwood,” of a moorland dwelling, "could such provision have been produced for people dropping from the blue. Who could count the variety of the cakes or expound their excellence? Only some remnants of decency stopped us from eating of each in turn.” The name of*the host, who was the very type of a character of adventure and romance, was one illustrious in Border minstrelsy. It seemed strange that he should never have heard of his namesake’s ballad till a passing stranger told him of it. The border days heightened the visitor’s pleasure in rereading “Guy Mannering.” The setting and the book refleetd living rays on each other. Of Scott, Mr Gwynn says:—“What a benefactor that man was; what a stream of health-giving pleasure, which the simplest can enjoy, yet which onlv a lifetime of reading and experience can make yon taste fully.” The visit sent him back not only to Scott, but to his sources. In Mr Henderson’s superb edition of the “Border ho finds a map that is no longer a dead thing, but a living guide, and can realise for the first time the whole picture of Jamie Tolfer running on foot across moor and fell from the head waters of Teviot to Stobs Ha’, where the Elliots denied him help, and then to Branksome, getting mounted by the way; thence, the fraye going out up the converging burns and waters to the scattered houses, and the quick mounting of riders to chase the captain of Bowcastle as he drove his prey by blind roads towards his stronghold in the waste; the overtaking in that Liddesdalo Valley, up which the train runs from Carlisle to Hawick, the bickering fight between two parties of hardy men —and, finally, the upshot of it all, when, at the cost of men slain and houses hurried— Instead of his «in ten milk kye, Jamie Telfer has gotten thirty and three. Fighting is romantic, consiedrs Mr Gwynn, only when men fight about some small practical thing like that, instead of the abstract fate of nnweildy empires. He would back Jamie Telfer’s ballad to survive any poem of the Great War. And though Waterloo is romantic, compared with most groat battles, can the monument on the field of Waterloo hold its own for living interest against the tomb at Dryburgh ?