mind, a strong turn to study poetry and works of imagination." Beyond these indications, little is known of Scott's mother to support the popular fancy which ascribes filial distinction to maternal qualities; in fact, the father, a man of fine but singular disposition, fills a far larger space in the reminiscences of the poet's carlier years, and was, long after, painted by him with loving fidelity in “Redgauntlet." A fever in infancy rendered Walter lame in his right leg, and he was sent for recovery to his grandfather Robert, at Sandy-knowe. From this place, where Scott was nursed for about two years, dated his earliest recollections. Tales of the Jacobite risings, and of Border life and its heroes, neither as yet too distant for genuine tradition, were soon taught him; "Merrymen all," he says, "of the persuasion and calling of Robin Hood and Little John;" and one can imagine the romantic disguise under which the violent deeds of "auld Watt of Harden" and the rest, were presented by family pride to the child who was to immortalize them. Visits to Bath and elsewhere were made for the sake of Walter's health, and he so far threw off the weakness of limb that, until the early decay of his constitution, it hardly disqualified him from any vigorous exercise. Scott's lameness, like Byron's, impelled his eager and courageous disposition to a more than average display of physical energy; one may trace to it, in some degree, the rather overstrained emphasis laid by Scott on field sports and volunteer drill whilst his strength lasted; excess in which, not improbably, was one reason why he found himself an old man before fifty; (1820, vi: 269.) Ingenious excuses are never wanting to give the body more than its due share; and when there is activity of mind also, as in Scott and Byron, it takes its revenge in premature decay. On the other hand, the boy's lameness had a nobler result; giving him leisure for a large range of reading,―miscellaneous indeed, but lying in those imaginative regions, the air of which strengthens the higher nature within us. He entered the Grammar School of Edinburgh in 1778. A letter written by a gifted lady presents an excellent picture of the child as he was at six,-indeed, of Scott as he remained through life :-"boy for ever," in Shakespeare's phrase, with the lasting childhood and sensitiveness of genius. "I last night supped in Mr. Walter Scott's. He has the most extraordinary genius of a boy I ever saw. He was reading a poem to his mother when I went in. I made him read on; it was the description of a shipwreck. His passion rose with the storm. He lifted his eyes and hands. There's the mast gone, says he; crash it goes !—they will all perish! After his agitation, he turns to me: That is too melancholy; I had better read you something more amusing. I preferred a little chat, and asked his opinion of Milton and other books he was reading, which he gave me wonderfully. When taken to bed last night, he told his aunt he liked that lady [Mrs. Cockburn, the writer], for I think she is a virtuoso like myself.-Dear Walter, says Aunt Jenny, what is a virtuoso?-Don't ye know? Why, it's one who wishes and will know everything." ... Those about Scott may have been already impressed, like Mrs. Cockburn, wit his mental energy and determination to "know everything." But in the Aut biography he adopts another tone, which reappears in his later letters. He wa conscious that industry had not come to him without a struggle. About one of h brothers he remarks, that he had "the same determined indolence that marked u all." No description could, at first sight, appear less applicable to himself. there be one constant attribute of real genius, it is vast capacity for and enjoy ment of labour. Genius often makes us feel that it is almost synonymous wit patience, as Buffon and Reynolds called it. And it would be difficult to find man of genius whose recorded works, -never more than a portion of the man' whole work,—are more extensive and varied than Scott's. He had, in the highes degree, another charming quality, often, though not so essentially an attribute o intellectual excellence-Modesty. Hence, throughout his life he undervalued him self, and thought little of his own energy. Yet we cannot doubt that this "deter mined indolence," like the irritability of temper which he so subdued that fev suspected its existence, was a real element in his nature. At school (1778-1783) Scott's zeal for study is inferior to the ardour of Shelley; he takes not th slightest interest in what is not only the most perfect, but the most essentially "romantic" of literatures,-that of Greece; even in Latin going only far enough to set the highest value upon the modern verse of Buchanan, and after him, or Lucan and Claudian. He was satisfied with a working knowledge of French German, Italian, and Spanish. Perhaps the family failing expended itself in confining his studies to the circle marked out by strong creative impulse, the history, manners, romances, and poetry of mediaeval and modern Europe. Look ing back now at the result, the Poems and the Novels, one is inclined to say that Scott in all this followed the imperious promptings of nature. This, however, was not his own judgment. He regretted nothing more bitterly than his want of the severe classical training. "I forgot the very letters of the Greek alphabet,” he says in the Autobiography of 1808, " a loss never to be repaired, considering what that language is, and who they were who employed it in their compositions." And again, “I would at this moment give half the reputation I have had the good fortune to acquire, if by doing so I could rest the remaining part upon a sound foundation." Within the range noticed, however, his "appetite for books was as ample and undiscriminating as it was indefatigable; few ever read so much,” he adds, or to so little purpose." Spenser, Tasso's "Jerusalem" in the English, "above all, Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry," are specified; and although throughout his life Scott exhibited a reluctance to employ his powerful mind on subjects requiring hard thought, and was disposed to defer any work upon which he was engaged to the last, yet in the main we may regard the "determined indolence" as absorbed into the meditative atmosphere (if we may use the word) of the poetical nature; as the undersoil whence so many masterpieces 66 of imaginative writing were destined to grow. There is a strong general likeness Jon this point between Scott and the greatest of his contemporaries in poetry: and the words in which Wordsworth described himself would have borne an equal application to his friend :— My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought As if life's business were a summer mood. "My life," Scott himself says, in one of the most remarkable passages of his Diary (Dec. 27, 1825), “though not without its fits of waking and strong exertion, has been a sort of dream, spent in Chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy I have worn a wishing-cap, the power of which has been to divert present griefs by a touch of the wand of imagination, and gild over the future by prospects more fair than can be realized." Scott's character was essentially formed and finished in early youth, and these words may be considered the key to his whole career and character. Worldly wisdom, love of social rank, passion for lands and goods; —these are the motives by which it has been often assumed that he was guided. Mr. Carlyle even appears in his remarkable Essay to regard Scott as unentitled to the claim of greatness, because he did not throw his strength into grasping the problems of modern life or the eternal difficulties of human thought,-and treats him as an eminently genial and healthy man of the world, whose writings were rather pieces of skilful and rapid manufacture for the day, than likely to prove "heirlooms for ever." But so "antithetically mixed" was his nature, that at the same time he was in the spirit hidden away with poetry and the past, and moving among romantic worlds of his own creation. Viewed from one side, Scott, as printer and lawyer, with " a thread of the attorney in him," as "laird" and man of society, appears in unromantic contrast to most of his “brothers in immortal verse: viewed from another, it may be doubted whether any of his contemporaries lived the life of the poet so completely. A strong capacity for such work as his nature secretly preferred, and towards which he was unconsciously finding his way, marks the boyhood of Scott. This found its main exercise at first in a love for inventing and relating marvellous tales which amounted to real passion. “Whole holidays were spent in this pastime, which continued for two or three years, and had, I believe, no small effect in directing the turn of my imagination to the chivalrous and romantic in poetry and prose." "He used to interest us," writes a lady who was then his playmate, "by telling us the visions, as he called them, which he had lying alone. . . . Child as I was, I could not help being highly delighted with his description of the glories he had seen, Recollecting these descriptions," of which we cannot but regret that she preserved no memorial, "radiant as they were, I have often though since, that there must have been a bias in his mind to superstition-the marvellou seemed to have such power over him, though the mere offspring of his ow imagination, that the expression of his face, habitually that of genuine benevolence mingled with a shrewd innocent humour, changed greatly while he was speakin of these things, and showed a deep intenseness of feeling, as if he were awed eve by his own recital." Scott, as he was throughout life, is again before us in th little delineation; the kindness, the superstition, the shrewdness: and one alread sees "Waverley” and “Lammermoor" in their infancy. Meanwhile that other element of poetry which is only second in Scott's writing to the picture of human life,—the natural landscape,—began to assert its influenc over him. Actors were thronging fast within the theatre of his imagination; th first sketches of the background and scenery for the drama were now supplied From a visit to Kelso, "the most beautiful, if not the most romantic village i Scotland," Scott traced his earliest consciousness of the magic of Nature Wordsworth's passion was for the Visions of the hills And Souls of lonely places. The passion of Scott differed from this through the leading place which historica memories held in his heart. "The romantic feelings which I have described a predominating in my mind gradually rested upon and associated themselves wit the grand features of the landscape around me; and the historical incidents c traditional legends connected with many of them gave to my admiration a so of intense impression of reverence, which at times made my heart feel too big fo its bosom. From this time the love of natural beauty, more especially whe combined with ancient ruins, or remains of our fathers' piety or splendour, becam with me an insatiable passion, which I would willingly have gratified by travellin over half the globe." Scott's transfer from the Edinburgh High School to th College (1783-1786), probably gave him the first freedom to indulge this impuls within bounds which, though narrow in themselves, were of inexhaustible interes to his sympathetic imagination. Without "travelling over half the globe” h could create a realm of his own, sufficient for himself and for his readers. It astonishing to look at the map, and observe within how small a radius from Edir burgh the hundred little places lie which he has made familiar names throughou the whole civilized world.-We have noticed that Scott's father, (with himself i youth,) is painted in "Redgauntlet." Nothing was ever better contrasted in romance than these two characters; and one sees that the real Alan Fairford wa already beginning at college those adventurous ways which may have made th old Writer to the Signet feel that the wild moss-trooping blood of Harden wa once more at work within the veins of his gallant boy. A wise confidence le Walter free. He wandered for days together over the historical sites of the neighbourhood, and when at home, in lieu of devotion to the prosaic mysteries of the Scottish law, was able to please his fancy by founding that collection of wayside songs and historical relics which filled so large a space in the innocent happiness of his after-years, and was not less a necessary of life to him than his cabinet of rocks and minerals is to the geologist. The mode in which Scott observed Nature is strictly parallel to his representation of human life. (As he rarely enters into the depths of character, preferring to exhibit it through action, and painting rather the great general features of an age than dwelling on the details for their own sake, so he mainly deals with the landscape; two or three admirable pictures excepted. Compare his descriptions with those by Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, and the difference in regard to the points noted will be felt at once. Scott was aware of this. "I was unable," says the Autobiography, "with the eye of a painter to dissect the various parts of the scene, to comprehend how the one bore upon the other. I have never, indeed, been capable of doing this with precision or nicety." A curious testimony is borne to the truth of this remark by Scott's failure (like Goethe's) to master even the rudiments of landscape drawing. "Even the humble ambition, which I long cherished, of making sketches of those places which interested me, from a defect of eye or of hand was totally ineffectual." But this absence of power over landscape forms was compensated for by a singularly fine perception of colour, examples of which have been given by Mr. Ruskin in the interesting criticisms on Scott contained in his "Modern Painters." Scott's almost total want of ear for music was a calamity which he shared with a large number of great poets; the strong sense of the melody in words and the harmonies of rhythm appearing to leave no space in their organization for inarticulate music. | -Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard if true at all, is true only of the poet. Beside the irresistible impulse which directed Scott's reading to "romantic" and poetical literature, to story-telling, and to country wanderings, he was seriously impeded by illness from pursuing his college studies. And by the time the Academical course was concluded, the passion which governed his youth, and perhaps secretly coloured the complexion of his future life, had already fallen upon him. Little has been told of this early love: force of feeling, and force to repress the signs of feeling, are two of the principal elements in Scott's character; he undergoes evil with a pathetic simplicity; he suffers in silence. From what, however, we can learn, it is natural to read in the "love that never found his earthly close" the true source of that peculiar shade of pensive melancholy which runs like a silver thread through almost everything he wrote, is heard as a "far-off Aeolian note" in all his b |