being about to go out of the business, advised him to use heavy old-fashioned locks, and to keep a terrier in his house. Scott afterward threw this incident into a couplet that still endures as a memorial of the long departed transgressor : "Yelping terrier, and rusty key, Was Walter Scott's best Jeddart fee." Another case, for which he received five guineas, was an unavailing defence of an unfortunate clergyman who had fallen into disreputable ways and was turned out of the ministry. Later he defended and secured the acquittal of a sailor lad, who, in firing off a toy cannon, had accidentally killed a passer-by. A button, having in some way fallen into the cannon, took the place of bullet with fatal result. Although he had the assistance of friends in securing business, his income appears to have been small. His fee book shows that his receipts the first year were £24, 3s, and even as far on as the fifth year of his practice, his income was less than $800, a good third of which came from his father's office. Although he was the life of a circle of brilliant young men who gathered about him in the law courts to hear his latest story, told as no one but himself could tell it, Scott was not what is known as a rising lawyer. His time was given largely to literary pursuits. In 1789 he was pleased to receive an appointment by the Crown to the vacant sheriffship, a district judgeship of Selkirkshire, a position carrying a salary of £300, sufficient to relieve his mind of financial anxiety, and requiring his absence from Edinburgh but a small part of each year. Speaking of himself and his profession, Scott says, "There was no great love between us at the beginning, and it pleased Heaven to decrease it on further acquaintance." A few years later he was appointed Clerk of a higher court in Edinburgh. This position also required but a part of his time. Thus we see that his legal studies and his friends in the courts secured two routine appointments, the acceptance of which amounted to a virtual resignation of all claims to future eminence in the law, but which gave him a comfortable income and enabled him to establish a home in the country for occupancy during the summer season. Best of all, he was now able to give scope to his natural bent. Early Literary Work. - After his admission to the bar, Scott gave free play to his love for Border lore. His gift for pleasing made him a welcome guest in many a gentleman's home throughout the country-side, and he seldom refused an invitation, if the vicinity gave promise of old castles and battlefields to be viewed, or of ballads to be heard. We read of excursions here and trips there - of a long ride in search of " Auld Thomas of Tuzzilehope, an Elliot, who was celebrated for his skill on the Border Pipe, and especially for his ability to sing the real lilt of Dick o' the Cow." As many as seven successive annual excursions were made into Liddesdale, full of uproarious fun and good humor, from which he returned each time laden with mementos, and happy in the possession of ballads sung by the peasantry. There were no inns in Liddesdale, and none were needed. Scott rode on horseback from farmhouse to farmhouse, where his coming was hailed with delight and was the event of the summer. A Mr. Shortreed who guided him on these trips says: "Ah me, sic an endless fund o' humor and drollery as he had wi' him! Never ten yards but we were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawly he suited himsell to everybody! He aye did as the lave did: never made himsell the great man or took ony airs in the company. He was making himsell a' the time, but he didna ken, maybe, what he was about till years had passed. At first he thought o' little, I daresay, but the queerness and the fun." To one interested in the sources from which Scott afterward drew, an account of these trips is most suggestive. In a letter written from the vicinity of Flodden Field to a friend seventeen years before the publication of Marmion, we can find the germ of the sixth canto. During the years of his apprenticeship to the law, it is doubtful whether Scott had any idea of what awaited him. It is probable that he did as he did simply because his natural tastes led him along. At any rate we find that he was a member of a literary coterie of young men who afterward became eminent in various learned professions. He pursued the study of German with avidity, being one of the first to realize that German literature runs parallel to English literature and is its only worthy rival in wealth of myth, tradition, fairy tale, and folk lore. Hours, that in the estimation of his prudent friends should have been spent in reading law, were man. occupied in making metrical translations of such poems as The Erl King. His first considerable publication, in 1796, was a volume of ballads translated from the GerThe influence of his German studies now brought him to the definite formation of a plan of his own for the publication of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, for which he had long been acquiring material. It will be understood that many of these ballads, or at least the substance of them, were collected by word of mouth from the common people in the remotest glens of the Border, and would have been lost in these days of books and papers if they had not been recorded by Scott and his friends. Two volumes of the Minstrelsy appeared in 1802. Three years later Scott was so far encouraged by the reception of two or three of his own ballads as to write the Lay of the Last Minstrel, by the success of which the happy-go-lucky, affectionate, popular, but we may almost say briefless young lawyer, for whom his friends were anxious to make provision, at once leaped into prominence, and to the world became Edinburgh's most distinguished citizen. Subsequently Scott wrote poems and novels almost without number. He became wealthy, purchased a barren but historic and sightly tract of land on the Tweed, and converted it into a fine forest in which he built his mansion of Abbotsford. Toward the end of his days he became involved in the failure of his publishers, and made extraordinary efforts to pay off his creditors. But all these details must be left for the student's own investigation. Marmion. The poem was begun in November, 1806, and was published in February, 1808. The first edition of two thousand copies in quarto form was sold at a guinea and a half, $7.50 per copy. A second edition was required within a month, and cheaper editions followed in rapid succession. In all, some fifty thousand copies were sold during the author's lifetime. Hearing that a new poem was under consideration, Constable, the great Edinburgh publisher, who had been pleased by his share in the publication of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, offered one thousand guineas for the right to publish Marmion, and actually paid Scott that sum before a line of the poem had been committed to paper. Lord Byron, then a young poet, born to station and to wealth, felt called upon to rebuke what he considered a mercenary disposition in Scott. The following is the "Next view in state, proud prancing on his roan, Now forging scrolls, now foremost in the fight, The gibbet or the field prepared to grace; A mighty mixture of the great and base. And think'st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance, |