Laidlaw, WILLIAM

Laidlaw, WILLIAM, the friend and latterly amanuensis of Sir Walter Scott, was born at Blackhouse in Selkirkshire in November 1780. After farming with but little success at Traquair and Libberton, he settled in 1817 as a kind of factor and manager on the estate of Abbotsford, and was Scott's trusted counsellor in all his schemes of improvement. Here, with the exception of but three years after the disaster in Scott's affairs, he lived till Scott's death in 1832, his constant companion and household friend, honoured by an affection that his loyalty deserved. Laidlaw's acquaintance with Scott began in the autumn of 1802, and he supplied some of the materials for the third volume of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The sweet and simple pathos of his own ballad, 'Lucy's Flittin', would alone have kept the name of 'Willie' Laidlaw from being forgotten even were that name not safely enshrined in a hundred pages of Lockhart's Life of Scott. After his great master's death Laidlaw was factor successively on two Ross-shire estates, and died at his brother's farm at Contin in that county, 18th May 1845. See two papers in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal for July 26 and August 2, 1845.