The writing of a novel based upon a character so grotesque and repellent was not well suited to a man of Scott's wholesome and genial temperament. He soon tired of it, and indeed the only satisfaction he got out of it was in presenting the better side of the Black Dwarf's nature. He came in time to agree with the criticism of the publisher, William Blackwood, to which at first he had strenuously objected, and the novel, originally intended to be in two volumes, was crowded into one and hurried to an end, thereby producing a narrative, as the author facetiously remarked in later years, 'as much disproportioned and distorted as the Black Dwarf, who is its subject.'
[1] Or Bowed Davie of the Woodhouse Farm.
In the grounds of the Observatory at Maxwelltown, across the river from Dumfries, is a small pavilion, enclosing two sculptured figures. One represents an old Scotchman, half reclining on a tombstone, a chisel in his left hand and a mallet resting by his side; the other is a pony, apparently waiting for his master to arise. The sculptures were the work of a local artist. They were disposed of by lottery to a young man, who died by accident the next day, and they are here deposited as a curious 'memorial to departed worth.'
The figures, thus used as a monument to the man who chanced to own them, were intended to represent a very different person. 'Old Mortality' and his pony were familiar to the people of Dumfriesshire and other parts of Scotland for more than forty years. His real name, as is well known, was Robert Paterson. He was a mason or stone-cutter by trade, who operated a small quarry. In middle life he became so thoroughly imbued with the religious enthusiasm of the Cameronians, of which austere sect he was a zealous member, that he felt impelled to desert his wife and five children, in order that he might perform the duty which, he conceived, had devolved upon him. This was to travel about the country and repair the gravestones of the martyred Covenanters. He would clear off the moss from the old stones and recut the half-defaced inscriptions, doing this often in { 167} remote and almost inaccessible recesses of the mountains and moors. Scarcely a churchyard in Ayr, Galloway, or Dumfriesshire is without some evidences of his work.