Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

equire his text in order to be able to live to posterity. Here again is the symbiosis of antiquary
and artefact. For Scott to have an afterlife in his collection he must provide a literary context for
it. Otherwise the gabions will lose their meaning, which resides only ‘in the name of the persons
to whom they have belonged, or the account of the deeds in which they have been employed’. 68
Figure 41 Walter Scott in the hall at Abbotsford, c1830
Scott’s quotations from Adamson in Reliquiae do not include the first muse’s speech, but
its sentiments are everywhere. The gabions’ role is to speak for themselves and for their owner,
master, muse in his absence. Scott holds back from the literal personification that Adamson
deploys, invoking instead the classical idea of the memory theatre. This is surely more important
to the structure of the last part of the text than Hewitt allows. Oldbuck, characteristically and
ironically, cannot remember the origins of the Greek mnemonic system that uses an imaginary
building and its contents as a sequence of prompts for a narrative and attributes it wrongly to
Lucian. 69 Scott, however, clearly follows up the hint and tours Abbotsford in his mind’s eye,
pausing at significant points to describe the furnishings, the objects and then by association their
origin and context. As he goes on the fiction falls away. The characters who emerge from the
text to inhabit Abbotsford are not the inventions of Waverley but Scott’s own friends and
acquaintances, the donors or makers of his collection. The narrative turns into an autobiographyby-objects
spoken in his own voice and recalling his own antiquarian feats:
68
Scott, Reliquiae Trotcosienses, p.25.
69
For an account of the development of the mnemonic system in Greece see Yates, The Art of Memory.
187