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

But wad ye see him in his glee,
For meikle glee and fun has he
Then set him down, and twa or three
Gude fellos wi’him:
And port, O port! Shine thou a wee,
And THEN ye’ll see him! 52
Burns and Grose enjoyed a real friendship, enshrined in the second volume of Grose’s
Antiquities, for which Burns wrote one of greatest poems, Tam ’o Shanter as well as
contributing notes to the entries on Ayrshire. The poet and the poetry are integrated with
the antiquarian text as thoroughly as the antiquary is incorporated in the poem.
Figure 6 Francis Grose
In Walter Scott the figures of poet and antiquary met in one man. In The
Antiquary Jonathan Oldbuck made manifest a figure by now widely familiar if latent in
the public mind. The book was written almost at a single stretch and composed in the
weeks immediately after Scott returned from his first trip abroad, during which he had
visited the field of Waterloo. Set in 1794, The Antiquary is not an historical novel, rather
it is a novel about history, some of it very recent, and its effect on the present, as realised
through antiquarianism. Events in France and the threat of invasion are the backdrop to
Oldbuck’s pursuit of the more distant past. Although there are several suggested models
the character is, by general consent, largely a self-portrait and the book as a whole
52 Burns, Complete Poems, pp. 260-62.
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