SIR WALTER SCOTT.

1771-1814.

POEMS.

BUT five-and-twenty years have elapsed since the death of Walter Scott, and yet we look back on him as if he belonged to a totally different epoch. His fame has lifted him so high above our ordinary level that we scarcely remember how short a time it is since he lived and worked among us

"A creature not too wise or good

For human nature's daily food."

The elder are apt to forget that he was our contemporary, and the younger generation never reflect on the thousands yet alive-scarcely past the prime of life-who have shaken him by the hand, and sat at his festive board, and listened to the sound of his voice, and watched the movements of that flexible and expressive countenance. But we should not let such a cloud of oblivion come between us and the object of so much love and admiration. We should not allow the

repu

tation of the author to dim our memory of the man. And with this view we will devote a few pages, quickly read and easily remembered, to the main incidents in his life, and depict him in his threefold character of Poet, Novelist, and Man. If, in the course of our narrative, the language seems tinctured with personal feeling, we must plead in extenuation the strong temptation in our path. Who that has seen can ever forget the stalwart form and friendly face of the foremost man of all his time? How many there must be in all parts of the kingdom who remember, as one of the pleasing incidents of their school or college life, how they hurried up day after day to the Parliament House to gaze with silent admiration on the grey head and bending figure of the Clerk of Session, as he rapidly filled page after page, perhaps of some legal instrument, though glorified in their eyes with the fanciful idea that it might be a chapter of some future novel. Nobody once seeing his radiant smile-hearing his cheery voice as he made some good-natured remark to playful schoolboy on his way to Duddingstone, with his skates in hand-or, on happier occasions, who was stopped in the street and kindly examined as to where he stood in the Rector's class-nobody at the time could resist the fascination of voice and manner, and we confess it is almost

impossible, even now, to view with judicial calmness the course of his life and fortunes, or to pretend to a cold impartiality which, we feel, would be ingratitude to the individual man, as well as to the instructor, the delight, and the glory of his countrymen.

This is not meant for a laboured and minute biography, and we will, therefore, not trouble the reader with many details of birth and parentage. We will only say that in the year 1771, on the 15th of August, the future poet and novelist, being the son of a respectable writer to the signet, which is Scotch for an attorney, first saw the light in his father's house, in a narrow lane in Edinburgh, called the College Wynd. In his infancy a fever attacked him, and though his life was spared, it settled on his right leg, and made him permanently lame. He attained a good height, however, and great strength, and either at walking—with the support of his stout stick-or on horseback, there were few who could keep before him. After an education at various schools, in which, though rather desultory in his studies, he managed to acquire a very considerable amount of classical information, he entered his father's office as an apprentice, and led the life common at that time among young men of his age and rank. It was remarked that though he was

unavoidably thrown among what are called hard drinkers and fast livers, he himself very seldom exceeded the bounds of the exactest propriety. In the intervals between his schools, when he was sent to the country for the benefit of fresh air, at the house of his uncle, a farmer on the Tweed, he devoted himself to reading all the books that came in his way. The ballads of the neighbourhood were filled with accounts of the Border battles between the English and Scotch. Not a square old tower but had its tale of Johnny Armstrong or Wat o' the Cleugh, and imperceptibly the boy had filled his memory with the words of these old songs, and his heart with the wild feelings and love of lawless adventure from which they originally sprang. Another circumstance, which we are apt to lose sight of after the lapse of so many years, was the strong Jacobite feeling which still lingered in those remote districts when he was a youth. Many of the old men with whom he conversed had been "out in the '45," many had seen and spoken to the Pretender, and many had witnessed the remorseless and ill-judged cruelty of the executions which took place after the insurrection was quelled. The distance of time between 1745, the year of the rebellion, and 1783, when Scott was twelve years old, was not so great as that which intervenes between Waterloo

and the present day. But Waterloo medals are still frequent. Within this year many of us may have heard accounts of the glorious battles in the Peninsula from soldiers who were present at them all. And if we consider how different such a great and agitating incident of a nation's history as an attempt to dethrone one king and set up another-the momentous struggle going on among our own countrymen and on our own soil-how different this is from a contest, however serious, and victories however great, of which the scene is far away and the actors are unknown to us, we shall perceive that the incidents of 1745 must have been remembered more freshly than many later events. So the influences which went to the formation of Walter Scott's character were strangely combined. The wild passion for active life, even though its activity was that of the freebooter of the Border -the poetic sympathy with the cause of the unfortunate Stuarts, which, of course, was accompanied by high Cavalier feelings of loyalty and obedience these incongruous elements being further mixed up with the solemn, rigid Puritanism of his father's home, give in some degree the key to the conflicting tendencies we shall see in his after life. Add to this his bodily infirmity, which kept him from the rougher sports of youth, and made him shy and nervous