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

Figure 5 The Eglinton Tournament, James Henry Nixon, 1839
As a fully-realised literary character the antiquary emerges, conveniently, in 1789
with Robert Burns’s ‘An Ode on the Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations thro’ Scotland
Collecting the Antiquities of that Kingdom’. Grose had been researching his Antiquities
of Scotland when he met Burns who reported that he had:
Never seen a man of more original observation, anecdote and remark ... His delight is to steal thro' the
country almost unknown, both as most favourable to his humour and his business… 49
Burns’s portrait of Grose is full of particularity. The ‘fine, fat fodgel wight /
O’stature short but genius bright’ bursts as he clearly did in life [fig: 6] with energy and
good humour. 50 There are many echoes, possibly conscious, of Adamson, including the
teasing tone and the accumulation of such impossible objects as the ‘broomstick o’the
witch of Endor’ and ‘Auld Tubalcain’s fire-shool and fender’ along with some Burnsian
ribaldry in ‘that which distinguished the gender of Balaam’s ass’ and a sly satirical poke
at the ‘Antiquarian trade’. 51 The overwhelming impression, however, is of the vitality of
a man in whom stealth is combined with exuberance and, in the right circumstances,
clubability, a unique variant on a now recognisable theme.
49 Burns, Letters, 1, p.423.
50 Burns, Complete Poems, pp. 260-62.
51 Burns, Complete Poems, pp. 260-62.
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