الجميلة д 821 Sco 8 1865 THE LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. BY ALEXANDER LEIGHTON. It has been sometimes said, that there is nothing of which a man is more vain than of authorship, yet Sir Walter Scott was certainly more proud of his pedigree than of his writings; and, what is scarcely less strange, that which he valued the less as the means of making him, while that which he valued the more was the source of his greatest misfortunes. The Border, that great nursery of families, gave birth to the Dukes of Buccleuch, with whom the poet was connected. It is fortunate that those who are proud of lineage are exempted from questioning, or even looking at the origin of their families; for it is more true than pleasant to their descendants, that the beginnings of these Border septs were often men whose superiority was founded on nothing better than the stealing of cattle. Yet such is the power of genius in transferring qualities, that even so mean and disreputable a calling has received at the hand of this, one of her sons, something so like an appearance of dignity and heroism, that the author could congratulate himself on both ends of his pedigree. Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, on the 15th of August 1771, a day signalised by the birth of Napoleon. His father, a man of unblemished reputation for correct business habits, honesty, and benevolence, was a writer to the signet; his mother, Ann Rutherford, was daughter of Dr John Rutherford, first professor of physic in the University of Edinburgh, who had studied under the celebrated Boerhave. Mr Robert Scott, farmer at Sandyknowe, in the vicinity of Smailholm Tower, upon the Borders, was the paternal grandfather, being the son of Mr Walter Scott, a younger son of Walter Scott of Raeburn, third son of Sir Walter Scott of Harden. The Scotts of Harden, again, came, in the fourteenth century, from the stock of |