Learning poetry by rote and bawling it out in unison with your classmates is probably a thing of the past. Walter Scott's verse was a favourite. "The way was long, the wind was cold,/The Minstrel was infirm and old . . ." Scott won great renown for his epic poems and for his Waverley novels. Late in life he discovered a method of expression which gave him special delight: a personal journal, espsodic, not fearing to go back into the past or put things in irregular order. "I myself have lost recollection of much that was interesting and I have deprived my family and the public of some curious information." He refers to the example of Byron, who wrote of events just as they came into his mind. On the first page Scott starts off with Ireland. "I was in Ireland last summer (he is writing in 1825) and there is much less exaggeration about the Irish than is to be expected. Their poverty is not exaggerated - it is on the extreme verge of human misery - their cottages would scarce serve for pig sties even in Scotland and their rags seem the very refuse of a ragshop . . . Then for food they have only potatoes and too few of them. Yet the men look stout and healthy and the women buxom and well-coloured."
But Scott, writing the next day, says that if their poverty was not exaggerated, neither is their wit. "I gave a fellow a shilling on some occasion when sixpence was the fee. `Remember you owe me sixpence.' Said Pat: "May Your Honour live till I pay you'," Scott writes of the perpetual kindness of the Irish but goes on to say that they are terribly excitable to be sure "and will murther you on slight suspicion and find out that it was all a mistake and that it was not yourself they meant to kill, at all, at all." Maybe Scott had a sense of humour that we underestimate. He was given the freedom of the city of Cork in a silver box. "I thought I was out of their grace for going to see Blarney rather than the cove, [Cobh]."
Scott knew Thomas Moore and heard from him this story. He and Byron were standing at a window of Byron's palazzo in Venice and Moore began to say something of the beauty of the sunset. "Byron answered in a tone that I can easily conceive, `Ah damn me Tom, don't be poetical'." Scott's verdict on Byron was that he wrote from impulse, never from effort "and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetical geniuses of my time and a half-century before me". Y
Dear Diary, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, Cannongate Classics, £14.15.