Scott Centenary

Even in his lifetime Sir Walter Scott was a hero. He earned $1,000,000 by his pen, probably more than any man before him. He dug up and popularized ancient ballads and legends, versifying whole sections of them in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and the Lay of the Last Minstrel while galloping about in cavalry maneuvers. With The Lady of the Lake Scott became a national figure; the Scottish duty on post-horses was raised when tourists began flocking to see its authentic background. Scott had a shrewd publisher in famed Constable, but they quarreled and Scott set up his old schoolmate James Ballantyne and his brother in a rival house. Soon Scott began publishing anonymously the successful "Waverley Novels." Even the Prince Regent could not induce "The Wizard of the North" to drop his anonymity--until Ballantyne & Co. failed. Scott went back to Constable. In 1825 Constable too crashed, leaving Scott more than $600,000 in the red. Friends, admirers, bankers offered to help. But Sir Walter Scott, bankrupt, widowed and ill, pitched in and for six years worked to pay off his debts. He was only half successful, but later royalties wiped out the remainder. In the last year of his life. Scott was given a vessel by the British Government in which to seek health cruising the Mediterranean. Soon he gave it up, traveled across Europe to die at 61 in Abbotsford, 100 years ago last week.

Celebrating the centenary, Prince George of England and the Lord Provost of Edinburgh led a procession from St. Giles's Cathedral to the Scott Monument in Princes Street. In Waverley Market, school children performed a masque based upon the Waverley Novels. Miss Patricia Scott, great-great-great-granddaughter, unveiled a memorial in Galashiels, across the River Tweed from Abbotsford. Sir Robert Home, onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer, made a speech extolling Scott's "shining immortality." From Galashiels, whither went many a Scottish pilgrim, was broadcast a musical version of the Lay of the Last Minstrel. In Dryburgh Abbey there were ceremonies commemorating Scott's burial there. And in many a mountain glen the clans gathered, the pibrochs skirled.

Columbia University, a frequent U. S. commemorator, was to have opened a library exhibit of Scottiana, with items loaned by Owen D. Young and John P. Morgan. Because of delay in printing catalogs it was postponed until Oct. 1. But one Scott celebration did come off last week, surprisingly enough in the Hebrew Cultural Gardens in Rockefeller Park in Cleveland, an enterprise designed by the Cleveland Gan Ivri League (Hebrew Garden League, a woman's organization) to include symbolic German, Italian and Polish gardens.

Every U. S. schoolboy knows Rebecca, the beauteous, unhappy Jewess in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Many a little U. S. girl has felt sorry that Rebecca, whose figure "might indeed have compared with the proudest beauties of England," did not in the end marry Wilfred of Ivanhoe who saved her from being burnt as a sorceress. Thrilled by Rebecca's stout defiance of Brian de Bois-Guilbert ("I will not trust thee, Templar!") and his mollification by her fortitude (in threatening to jump off a parapet), most children are unaware, as indeed are many grownups, that the original of virtuous Rebecca was a pious young lady from Philadelphia named Rebecca Gratz.

From Austrian Silesia, in 1754 and 1759, emigrated the Brothers Barnard and Michael Gratz. Their progeny reached eminence in various ways, but none more than Rebecca (1781-1869) daughter of Michael. In Philadelphia today survive charities founded by Rebecca Gratz. One of her good works was to nurse Matilda Hoffman, fiancee of Washington Irving, before Matilda died of tuberculosis at 17. Irving, grief-stricken, hurried off to Europe, where he met Sir Walter Scott and told him about Rebecca Gratz. In 1819, after Ivanhoe was published, Scott is supposed to have written: "How do you like your Rebecca? Does this Rebecca I have pictured compare well. . . ?"

In Cleveland's Hebrew Cultural Gardens last week, with Scottish bagpipers droning and Scott authorities lecturing, a bronze bas-relief of Rebecca Gratz was unveiled at the Gardens' entrance across the street from the Shakespeare Garden.

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