Sir Walter Scott's 'Guy Mannering'

I finished reading Scott's Guy Mannering late this morning - real 'meat' betwixt breakfast and a scanty lunch. Such a book warms the cockles of one's heart.
(As an aside, apparently the phrase dates back to the mid-1600s, a time when scientific texts were often written in Latin. The Latin term cochleae cordis means ventricles of the heart, and most probably, the word cochleae was corrupted as cockles. This may have been a mistake made by the less learned, or a deliberate joke. Add in the fact that the bivalve mollusk known as a cockle is shaped somewhat like a heart, and the idea of the phrase cockles of one’s heart being more or less a joke gains credence. Believe this as you may.)

   

                        First Edition -1815                             Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

John Buchan, in his magisterial biography of Sir Walter (March 1932) argues that Lovers of Scott will always dispute which is his best novel, but all will put Guy Mannering among the first three. Apparently, it was written in six weeks and there are certainly blemishes: the hero may inspire other characters in the tale, but hardly the reader; Julia Mannering and Lucy Bertram fail to raise the pulse; and Dominie Sampson, whilst an 'original', can bore with his repetition. For me, Meg Merrilies lingers long after one has put the novel away: she flits between the pages and on her deathbed inscribes her epitaph: When I was in life, I was the mad randy gypsey, that had been hounded like a stray tyke from parish to parish - wha would hae minded her word? - But now I am a dying woman, and my words will not fall to the ground, and more than the earth will cover my blood! 
The lawyer Pleydell is a fascinating character and the scenes in Edinburgh - at Clerihugh's tavern, where he held his hebdomadal carousals; and at the reading of old Miss Margaret Bertram's will, where a lugubrious company of cousins in the third, fourth, fifth , and sixth degree stood in hope... (the principal expectants), and the subsequent  cortege - six starved horses, themselves the very emblems of mortality, well cloaked and plumed, lugging along the hearse with its dismal emblazonry -  are comic masterpieces. Scott has his fun with the law and lawyers, too: Law's like laudanum; it's much more easy to use it as a quack does, than to learn to apply it like a physician.
Dandie Dinmont rivals Pleydell as a round and believable figure. As Buchan says - wherever he appears he humanizes the scene, for he is triumphant humanity...when he appears we feel a sense of security...

Scott's narrative drive is first-rate; his cast of minor characters - Sir Robert Hazelwood, Macmorlan, the Mac-Guffogs, Mrs MacCandlish - are believable and add to the story-line. Glossin and Dirk Hatteraick fulfil their roles as villains splendidly. The various descriptions of the landscape in the Lake District and the coastal south-west of Scotland provide powerful backcloths to the tale.

I finished the novel all the better for having read it - a true romance.

A tiny footnote: I was surprised to read the following: ...a frolicksome humour much cherished by the whiskey which in Scotland is always put in circulation upon such occasions.  Whisky is the anglicised form of the Gaelic word uisge beatha (pronounced “oosh-kie bah”). Gaelic is native to both Ireland and Scotland, so it's hard to say where the E came from, but one now associates it with the Irish (and Americans) rather than the Scots.