He shall not dishonour the country through my sides, I can assure
him." In other words, Scott acted just as he had made Waverley and
others of his heroes act, on a code of honour which he knew to be
false, and he must have felt in this case to be something worse. He
thought himself at that time under the most stringent obligations both
to his creditors and his children, to do all in his power to redeem
himself and his estate from debt. Nay, more, he held that his life was
a trust from his Creator, which he had no right to throw away merely
because a man whom he had not really injured, was indulging a strong
wish to injure him; but he could so little brook the imputation of
physical cowardice, that he was moral coward enough to resolve to meet
General Gourgaud, if General Gourgaud lusted after a shot at him. Nor
is there any trace preserved of so much as a moral scruple in his own
mind on the subject, and this though there are clear traces in his
other writings as to what he thought Christian morality required. But
the Border chivalry was so strong in Scott that, on subjects of this
kind at least, his morality was the conventional morality of a day
rapidly passing away.
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