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THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL

By Sir Walter Scott



A Tale Which Holdeth Children From Play & Old Men From The Chimney
Corner --Sir Philip Sidney




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
. 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, too much encouraged
by the example of the monarch, who was, in other respects, neither
without talent nor a good-natured disposition, see Winwood's Memorials,
Howell's Letters, and other Memorials of the time; but particularly,
consult the Private Letters and Correspondence of Steenie, _alias_
Buckingham, with his reverend Dad and Gossip, King James, which abound
with the grossest as well as the most childish language. The learned Mr.
D'Israeli, in an attempt to vindicate the character of James, has
only succeeded in obtaining for himself the character of a skilful and
ingenious advocate, without much advantage to his royal client]

Such being the state of the court, coarse sensuality brought along with
it its ordinary companion, a brutal degree of undisguised selfishness,
destructive alike of philanthropy and good breeding; both of which, in
their several spheres, depend upon the regard paid by each individual
to the interest as well as the feelings of others. It is in such a time
that the heartless and shameless man of wealth and power may, like the
supposed Lord Dalgarno, brazen out the shame of his villainies, and
affect to triumph in their consequences, so long as they were personally
advantageous to his own pleasures or profit.

Alsatia is elsewhere explained as a cant name for Whitefriars, which,
possessing certain privileges of sanctuary, became for that reason a
nest of those mischievous characters who were generally obnoxious to the
law. These privileges were derived from its having been an establishment
of the Carmelites, or White Friars, founded says Stow, in his Survey
of London, by Sir Patrick Grey, in 1241. Edward I. gave them a plot of
ground in Fleet Street, to build their church upon. The edifice then
erected was rebuilt by Courtney, Earl of Devonshire, in the reign of
Edward. In the time of the Reformation the place retained its immunities
as a sanctuary, and James I. confirmed and added to them by a charter
in 1608. Shadwell was the first author who made some literary use of
Whitefriars, in his play of the Squire of Alsatia, which turns upon the
plot of the Adelphi of Terence.

In this old play, two men of fortune, brothers, educate two young men,
(sons to the one and nephews to the other,) each under his own separate
system of rigour and indulgence. The elder of the subjects of this
experiment, who has been very rigidly brought up, falls at once into
all the vices of the town, is debauched by the cheats and bullies of
Whitefriars, and, in a word, becomes the Squire of Alsatia. The poet
gives, as the natural and congenial inhabitants of the place, such
characters as the reader will find in the note. [Footnote: "Cheatly, a
rascal, who by reason of debts dares not stir out of Whitefriars, but
there inveigles young heirs of entail, and helps them to goods and money
upon great disadvantages, is bound for them, and shares with them till
he undoes them. A lewd, impudent, debauched fellow, very expert in the
cant about town.

"Shamwell, cousin to the Belfords, who, being ruined by Cheatly, is made
a decoy-duck for others, not daring to stir out of Alsatia, where he
lives. Is bound with Cheatly for heirs, and lives upon them a dissolute
debauched life.

"Captain Hackum, a blockheaded bully of Alsatia, a cowardly, impudent,
blustering fellow, formerly a sergeant in Flanders, who has run from his
colours, and retreated into Whitefriars for a very small debt, where by
the Alsatians he is dubb'd a captain, marries one that lets lodgings,
sells cherry-brandy, and is a bawd.

"Scrapeall a hypocritical, repeating, praying, psalm-singing, precise
fellow, pretending to great piety; a godly knave, who joins with
Cheatly, and supplies young heirs with goods, and money."--Dramatis
Personae to the Squire of Alsatia, SHADWELL'S Works, vol. iv.] The play,
as we learn from the dedication to the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, was
successful above the author's expectations, "no comedy these many years
having filled the theatre so long together. And I had the great honour,"
continues Shadwell, "to find so many friends, that the house was never
so full since it was built as upon the third day of this play, and vast
numbers went away that could not be admitted." [Footnote: Dedication to
the Squire of Alsatia, Shadwell's Works, vol. iv.] From the Squire of
Alsatia the author derived some few hints, and learned the footing
on which the bullies and thieves of the Sanctuary stood with their
neighbours, the fiery young students of the Temple, of which some
intimation is given in the dramatic piece.

Such are the materials to which the author stands indebted for the
composition of the Fortunes of Nigel, a novel, which may be perhaps one
of those that are more amusing on a second perusal, than when read a
first time for the sake of the story, the incidents of which are few and
meagre.

The Introductory Epistle is written, in Lucio's phrase, "according
to the trick," and would never have appeared had the writer meditated
making his avowal of the work. As it is the privilege of a masque or
incognito to speak in a feigned voice and assumed character, the author
attempted, while in disguise, some liberties of the same sort; and while
he continues to plead upon the various excuses which the introduction
contains, the present acknowledgment must serve as an apology for a
species of "hoity toity