Walter had disowned him, and put on no mourning at the news of his death-conduct which he lived bitterly to regret as harsh and unfeeling.

Our author was born in a house at the head of the College Wynd, which was afterwards pulled down to make room for a part of the New College. He was an uncommonly healthy child, till eighteen months old, when he was affected with a teething fever, at the close of which he was found to have lost the use of his right leg. Every conceivable remedy was adopted to no purpose. He was at last, by the advice of his grandfather, Dr Rutherfurd, sent out to Sandyknowe, in the hope that air and exercise would remove his lameness. There he had the first consciousness of existence, and remembered himself, in conformity with some quack-nostrum, wrapped up repeatedly in the warm skin of a flayed sheep, to encourage him to crawl-a circumstance in which he bears a certain ludicrous resemblance to the hermit Brian, in the "Lady of the Lake," inclosed in the skin of a white bull, and let down to the brink of a cataract to see visions, and dream dreams of dreadful augury—it is the one step from the sublime to the ridiculous inverted. This strange expedient failed. Scott owed much to his residence at Sandyknowe. His grandmother and aunt told him tales and sung him songs about the old Border thieves and their merry exploits, and sowed in his mind the seeds of future Deloraines and Clinthill Christies. A neighbouring farmer had witnessed the execution of the Jacobite rebels at Carlisle-he recounted it to Scott, and to this tale of horror, poured into the ear of the boy-poet, we are indebted for the trial and death-scenes at the close of "Waverley "—perhaps the most thrilling and powerful tragic matter out of Shakspeare, in the language. The American war was then going on; and to the weekly bulletins about its fluctuating progress, brought to Sandyknowe by his uncle, Thomas Scott, factor at Danesford, the little lame child did seriously incline his ear, and his cheek glowed and his eye kindled when he heard of any success on the part of the British arms-so early did the Tory-throb begin to beat within him. Some old books, too, lay on the

window-seat-" Automathes," Ramsay's "Tea-Table Miscellany," and "Josephus"-and were read to him in the dim days and the long nights of winter. He learned to recite the ballad of "Hardyknute" before he could read, and spouted it aloud to the annoyance of the worthy parish minister, Dr Duncan, when he called. To this we probably owe his lifelong admiration and amiable overestimate of that not very Homeric effusion. His aunt, Janet Scott, was his chief instructress, and stood to him in much the same relation as old Betty Davidson did to Burns, and was the true nurse in him of the poet. In spite of his lame limb, he began to stand, walk, and run, and his general health was confirmed by the open mountain air. Previous to this, an old shepherd was wont to carry him to the hills, where he contracted a strong attachment to the "woolly people "-an attachment which never forsook him. On one occasion he was forgotten among the knolls; a thunder-storm came on; in alarm they sought for the boy, and found him—not weeping or crying out, like the Goblin page, "Lost, lost, lost!" but lying on his back looking at the lightning, clapping his hands at each successive flash, and crying out, "Bonnie, bonnie!" It were a fine subject for a painter-"The Minstrel Child lost in a Border Thunder-storm"-and his attitude in the story reminds us of Gray's noble lines about Shakspeare, in the "Progress of Poesy"

"Far from the sun and summer gale,

In thy green lap was Nature's darling laid;
What time, where lucid Avon stray'd,
To him the mighty mother did unveil
Her awful face; the dauntless child

Stretch'd forth his little arms, and smiled."

In his fourth year, his affectionate aunt Janet accompanied him to Bath, his father entertaining the idea that the waters might benefit his lameness. He journeyed in a smack from Leith to London-(a lady of the name of Wright waggishly boasted long after to Joanna Baillie, "that she had been once Walter Scott's bedfellow;" it turned out, however, that "the irregularity" took place in the Leith smack, and when

the Æneas was four years of age!)-where he saw the usual sights, which stamped themselves with uncommon vividness on his memory. At Bath he lived a year, but derived little advantage from the waters. He attended, however, a dame's school for three months; met John Home, author of "Douglas," then residing there; went to the theatre, where, at the sight of Orlando and Oliver, in "As You Like It," quarrelling, he screamed out, "Arn't they brothers?"-(a story reminding us of young Byron in the Aberdeen theatre, when Petruchio was trying to force down on Kate the paradox of the moon being the sun, roaring out, "But I say it is the meen, sir")—and enjoyed the beauties of the pleasant place, which, in all but the neighbourhood of the Grampians, may be called the Perth or "Fair City" of England.

This visit to the theatre probably first excited in Scott's mind a desire to peruse the works of Shakspeare. On his return to Scotland, he spent some time in Edinburgh, went afterwards to Sandyknowe, and in his eighth year was a few weeks at Prestonpans, where he encountered an old military veteran called Dalgetty (a significant name, as the readers of "The Legend of Montrose" know full well), who became gracious with Scott, and, like the soldier in Goldsmith,

"Shoulder'd his crutch, and show'd how fields were won."

It is interesting to notice how not a few of the familiar names, known to him in his youth, have become classical on his written page. Thus Meg Dodds was the real name of a woman in Howgate "who brewed good ale for gentlemen." In the records of a Galloway trial, in which Scott was counsel, occurs the name "MacGuffog," afterwards that of the famous turnkey in "Guy Mannering;" besides one or two other names of the minor characters in the same novel. The name "Durward" may still be seen on the signs of Arbroath and Forfar, and Scott had doubtless met it there, as well as that of "Prudfute" in or near Perth, and "Morton" in the lists of Westland Whigs. Nothing, in fact, that ever flashed on the eye or vibrated on the ear of this wonderful man, but was in some form or other reproduced in his writings. It was pro

bably the same with Shakspeare, although all data on the subject are lost; and Mrs Quickly, Master Barnardine, Claudio, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Faulconbridge, seem all old acquaintances of the poet.

In 1778, after spending some time of private study under one Leechman and one French, he was sent to the High School under the charge of Luke Frazer, whom he describes as a good scholar and a very worthy man. Thence he passed to the Rector's class, taught by the celebrated Dr Adam, whose works on classical subjects, such as his "Roman Antiquities," "Grammar of Ancient Geography," &c., used to be very popular schoolbooks, and are not yet entirely superseded. Adam was a profound scholar, an amiable man, as enthusiastic as he was simple-minded and sincere, although his passionate attachment to Greek and Roman ideas of liberty led him to use expressions which, in these slavish times, were prejudicial to his interests. Many will remember his last words, "It is getting dark; you may go home, boys." He is said to have appreciated Scott's amazing memory, and frequently called him up to answer questions about dates; and, although neither he nor his other teachers had any suspicion of his genius, Adam pronounced him better acquainted than any of his contemporaries with the meaning, if not with the words, of the classical authors. He encouraged him also to make translations from Horace and Virgil. One or two trifling original pieces of verse by him, connected with this date, have been discovered. But, on the whole, although not a dunce, Scott was, as he says, an "incorrigibly idle imp," "c constantly glancing like a meteor from the bottom to the top of the form," and vice versâ, and shone more in the yards, or High School play-grounds, than in the class. Notwithstanding his infirmity, he was the bravest of foot-ball players, the swiftest of racers, the strongest of pugilists, the most persevering in snow-ball bickers, the most daring climber of the "kittle nine steps" (a pass of peril leading along the dark brow of the Castle Rock), and the most dexterous commander in the mimic battles fought in the Crosscauseway between the children of the mob and those of the higher citizens. Many

poets, such as Cowper and Shelley, have been overborne and become broken-hearted amidst the rough play of a public school; but the Scott, the Byron, and the Wilson find it their native element, and their early superiority in sports and pastimes is an augury of their future greatness, and of the manhood and all-sidedness of their genius.

From Adam's tuition Sir Walter would have instantly passed to college, had it not been that his health became delicate, and his father was induced to send him to Kelso. There, being once more under the kind care of his aunt Janet, he added to the stores of his reading, which in Edinburgh had been very extensive and miscellaneous; he became acquainted with Percy's "Reliques of Ancient Poetry," which left a deep and permanent impression on his mind; and at the school of one Lancelot Whale, which he attended for some months, he increased considerably his classical knowledge, besides making the acquaintance of James Ballantyne,-a man whose fortunes were afterwards so closely linked with his own, and in whose company, now in the school, and now in wandering along the banks of the Tweed, he began to exercise his unrivalled gift of story-telling. At Kelso, too—a spot distinguished by its combination of beauties, the Tweed and Teviot beside it melting in music into each other's arms, and near it noble mansions and ancient abbeys, leading away the imagination grandly to the mountains in the background-his eyes were first fully opened, never more to be shut, to the beauties of that Scottish nature of which he became the most ideal, yet minute, the most lingering and loving depicter.

He was soon recalled to Edinburgh, where he went instantly to Hill's Humanity (or Latin) and to Dalziell's Greek class, at neither of which did he profit much, and at the latter so little that he earned from his fellow-students the title of "the Greek blockhead." Glorying in his shame, he wrote an essay in which he preferred Ariosto to Homer, and threw contempt on the fine old language of the latter. The professor, whose sole claim to distinction lay in a collection of Greek extracts, was indignant, and said to Scott that a dunce he was and a dunce he would remain,-words which he lived to revoke, while