SIR WALTER SCOTT.

L

AYING down "Ivanhoe," after having re-read it, I

said to a friend, "If you wish to learn of heroism, read the pathetic life of Scott himself. Wilfred of Ivanhoe, in his gallant defence of Rebecca the Jewess,

'Is as moonlight unto sunlight, or as water unto wine,'

compared with the courageous, indomitable Sir Walter dying in harness."

Walter Scott, the ninth of twelve children, was born in Edinburgh, August 15, 1771. He was descended, as he writes in his fragment of autobiography, "from ancient families, both by my father's and mother's side. My father's grandfather was Walter Scott, well known in Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie. He was the second son of Walter Scott, first Laird of Raeburn, who was third son of Sir Walter Scott, and the grandson of Walter Scott, commonly called in tradition Auld Walt of Harden. I am therefore lineally descended from that ancient chieftain whose name I have made to ring in many a ditty, and from his fair dame, the Flower of Yarrow -no bad genealogy for a Border minstrel."

Scott's father was a lawyer, a man of fine presence, temperate, austere, and a strict Calvinist. His mother, Anne Rutherford, the eldest daughter of Dr. John Rutherford of Edinburgh, was a woman unusually well educated for those days, sweet-tempered, fond of poetry,

and an inspiration to her son Walter, who was her favorite, probably on account of his delicate health.

When the child was eighteen months old, a fever from teething produced a kind of paralysis of the right leg. He was therefore sent into the country with a maid, to live with his paternal grandfather on his farm at Sandy-Knowe. The maid, having left behind her at Edinburgh a lover, desired to return, and decided to cut with her scissors the throat of the lame and, as she thought, useless child, and bury him in the moss under the high crags at Sandy-Knowe. This project, being confided to the old housekeeper, was disapproved, and the infant was spared.

When the weather was fine, he was carried by the shepherd of the farm, and laid among his flock. Long afterwards Scott said, "The habit of lying on the turf there among the sheep and the lambs had given his mind a peculiar tenderness for these animals, which it had ever since retained."

As the child grew older, he began to struggle with his lameness, and though the leg was shrunken and contracted, he finally walked, ran, climbed the rocks, and became a robust boy.

From his grandmother, Walter heard many a tale of Auld Walt of Harden, and learned by heart numerous ballads which he used to declaim with great enthusiasm. Their only visitor, the clergyman of the parish, Dr. Duncan, was once extremely annoyed at the recital of the ballad of Hardyknute, and exclaimed, “One may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is."

When about eight years of age, the lad was taken back to Edinburgh to his father's house in George's

Square. The blue-eyed, brown-haired boy felt the change severely, for he wrote later, "Under the gentle government of my kind grandmother, who was meekness itself, and of my aunt, who, though of a higher temper, was exceedingly attached to me, I had acquired a degree of license which could not be permitted in a large family. I had sense enough, however, to bend my temper to my new circumstances; but such was the agony which I internally experienced, that I guarded against nothing more, in the education of my own family, than against their acquiring habits of self-willed caprice and domination.

"I found much consolation, during this period of mortification, in the partiality of my mother. She joined to a light and happy temper of mind a strong turn to study poetry and works of imagination. She was sincerely devout, but her religion was, as became her sex, of a cast less austere than my father's. Still, the discipline of the Presbyterian Sabbath was severely strict, and I think injudiciously so. Although Bunyan's 'Pilgrim,' Gesner's 'Death of Abel,' Rowe's Letters, and one or two other books, which for that reason I still have favor for, were admitted to relieve the gloom of one dull sermon succeeding to another, there was far too much tedium annexed to the duties of the day; and in the end it did none of us any good.

'My week-day tasks were more agreeable. My lameness and my solitary habits had made me a tolerable reader, and my hours of leisure were usually spent in reading aloud to my mother Pope's translation of 'Homer,' which, excepting a few traditionary ballads, and the songs in Allan Ramsay's Evergreen,' was the first poetry which I perused. My mother had good natural taste and great feeling. She used to make me

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pause upon those passages which expressed generous and worthy sentiments, and if she could not divert me from those which were descriptive of battle and tumult, she contrived at least to divide my attention between them."

A lady thus describes a scene from Walter's life in these early years: "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. '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,' says he, 'I had better read you something more amusing."

One of his tutors, Mr. James Mitchell, tells the following incident, which happened when Walter was about thirteen, and which shows the boy's kind heart. "I seldom had occasion, all the time I was in the family, to find fault with him, even for trifles, and only once to threaten serious castigation, of which he was no sooner aware than he suddenly sprang up, threw his arms about my neck, and kissed me. By such generous and noble conduct my displeasure was in a moment converted into esteem and admiration; my soul melted into tenderness, and I was ready to mingle my tears with his."

Walter was early sent to the high school in Edinburgh, where he was by no means a promising scholar, but his good-nature and ready imagination made him popular. "Boys," he says in his autobiography, "are uncommonly just in their feelings, and at least equally generous. My lameness, and the efforts which I made to supply that disadvantage, by making up in address what I wanted in activity, engaged the latter principle in my

favor; and in the winter play hours, when hard exercise was impossible, my tales used to assemble an admiring audience round Lucky Brown's fireside, and happy was he that could sit next to the inexhaustible narrator.”

Concerning these school days, he once related this story to Rogers, the poet: "There was a boy in my class. at school who stood always at the top, nor could I, with all my efforts, supplant him. Day came after day, and still he kept his place, do what I would; till at length I observed that when a question was asked him, he always fumbled with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eyes; and in an evil moment it was removed with a knife.

"Great was my anxiety to know the success of my measure; and it succeeded too well. When the boy was again questioned, his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not to be found. In his distress he looked down for it; it was to be seen no more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was the author of his wrong.

"Often in after life has the sight of him smote me as I passed by him; and often have I resolved to make him some reparation, but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior office in one of the courts of law of Edinburgh. Poor fellow ! I believe he is dead; he took early to drinking."

Though young Scott did not give as much time to Latin as was desired by his teachers, he read all the books within his reach. In his mother's dressing-room he discovered some odd volumes of Shakespeare, and