days. Automathes and Ramsay's Tea-table Miscellany were my favourites, although at a later period an odd volume of Josephus' Wars of the Jews divided my partiality. "My kind and affectionate aunt, Miss Janet Scott, whose memory will ever be dear to me, used to read these works to me with admirable patience, until I could repeat long passages by heart. The ballad of Hardyknute I was early master of, to the great annoyance of almost our only visiter, the worthy clergyman of the parish, Dr. Duncan, who had not patience to have a sober chat interrupted by my shouting forth this ditty. Methinks I now see his tall thin emaciated figure, his legs cased in clasped gambadoes, and his face of a length that would have rivalled the Knight of La Mancha's, and hear him exclaiming, One may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is.' With this little acidity, which was natural to him, he was a most excellent and benevolent man, a gentleman in every feeling, and altogether different from those of his order who cringe at the tables of the gentry, or domineer and riot at those of the yeomanry." At the tender age of four years, he was taken to Bath in England, with the hope that his lameness might be alleviated by drinking its waters. He had become, by this time, from his own exertions, change of air, and of place, a sturdy child-non sine diis animosus infans, as he happily applies the idea. He lived at Bath a year, without the least benefit; but his residence was marked by many circumstances calculated to cheer him, and to beget a love of the exciting and the ideal in a youthful mind. His uncle, Captain Robert Scott, arrived at that famous resort-took him to all the amusements of the appreciation of which his juvenile tastes were capable, and, beyond all, to the theatre. Here his fancy reigned and revelled; and, yielding himself wholly up to the illusion of one of Shakspeare's plays ("As You Like It"), he became noisy, and, during the quarrel between Orlando and his brother in the first scene, screamed out, "Ar'nt they brothers?" Every thing about Bath seemed to warm his apt imagination. The glitter of the toy-shop-the beauties of the Parade, with the sparkling waters of the Avon winding around it-the lowing of the cattle from the opposite hills-these, at that early date, left pictures in his brain, and remembered sounds in the ear of his soul, which never ceased nor faded in the lapse of years. It were worth the labour-a philosophy which the doctors have not yet mastered in all their intellectual analyses-to show how these early acquired thoughts lie dormant in the spirit until each becomes a nucleus around which other brilliant conceptions rally and bear fruit. Nothing but the strong force of boyish recollection ever enabled the divine mind of Goldsmith, when his heart had been torn and wrung by rough contact with the world-when guile had whispered the leprous words of temptation in his ear, and been withstood as by miracle-to place upon his page such a picture as this: "Sweet was the sound, when oft at evening's close, And this delicious strain arose from memories that had been covered, for long and many years, with tumultuous thoughts, with the suggestions of wayward passion, the fears of future success, and the thousand daily imaginations provoked by a hap-hazard existence in an overgrown and bustling metropolisthen, at some happy season, when the muse asserted her pliant hour of dominion, the verse flowed forth, to live in many a heart. Such is the force, the duration, of early sights and voices, treasured by the sensitive, the observant, and the good, who sympathize with excelling nature, and walk, like children, by her pure direction. We cannot, of course, follow the young wizard step by step through the mazes of his juvenility. He did too much after he came to man's estate, which claims our attention, to allow us to loiter by the way. And yet the influences which bend the mind-the inceptive efforts, the first triumphs of genius-the tardy encouragements, or generous incentives which impel or retard its journey toward the pinnacles of ambition—are intensely interesting. It is like prying into the mysteries of an Indian juggler, who seems a god to the benighted dwellers on the banks of the Ganges; and not to know them-not to be at last aware of the intellectual modus operandi by which so many thousands have been cheered and delighted-is to feel that sort of unsatisfied dismay experienced by the auditors of Prospero in the Tempest, when he abjures the rude magic which vexed sea and sky with meeting warfare; which revived the dead in their cerements; when he breaks his wand of wonder, and buries his book of necromancy beyond the plummet's visitation. In brief, in the case of Scott, the reading world have felt his witchery; they would know how it was put in action, and whence its grand essentials were derived. It was while at Bath, that the young Scott first acquired the rudiments of reading at a day school; and there a thirst for the acquisition of knowledge, and the gratification of a romantic curiosity, was begun. The then remote benefits of its indulgence have now been felt by the world. While we write, we question not that hundreds, nay, perhaps thousands, on this vast continent are perusing the works of the great novelist. The traveller on the wide inland lakes of the northwest, leans aside, in a nook of the steamer, and reads of the heroes, the warriors, and the eminent of yore, revivified by the genius of Scott-but whose ashes have vanished in the indistinctness of the dust, and whose very monuments are ruins. On the far rivers of the west, where the smoke of the "spirit-craft," as the Indians term them, canopies the unbroken forests for hundreds of miles, the tourist peruses the wizard's page; and, seated at many an ulpifted casement where the evening sunshine comes in, throughout the towns that skirt the Atlantic and dot the far interior, how numerous are they who, doubtless at this very moment, are enwrapt in the interest of some class of the giant brood of Waverly-until the red west shall pale its fires, and the glorious page grow dim! After his return to Edinburgh, the juvenile romancer spent the time which ensued from his fourth to his eighth year in alternate residence at that capital and Sandy-Knowe. At that period, sea-bathing having been prescribed, he was transported to Prestonpans, where an old gentleman, Captain Dalgetty by name-a military veteran, who had been in all the German wars-became his companion, and shed into his young ear a thousand tales of broils, and battailous emprize. The news of Burgoyne's defeat in America, which the shrewd youth had predicted, though doubtless against his wishes, shook his intimacy with the autumnal warrior. Another person, a friend of the autobiographer's father, was also encountered at the same place and afterwards sat for the portrait of Jonathan Oldbuck. He familiarized his young acquaintance with some of Shakspeare's famous characters; and thus, little by little, his imaginative attainments came thronging in upon his mind. When he removed from Prestonpans, it was to his father's house in St. George's square, Edinburgh; and this became the principal place of his residence until his marriage in 1797. While here, engaged a part of the time in drudgery ill suited to his talent, how many pictures must have arisen to the eye of his fancy, of his early residence at Sandy-Knowe-of the sheen of Leader Water-the sweet vale of the Tweed-the Border fortlet, Smailholme Tower-and the thousand legends which he learned by the bright "evening fire!" The power of these over his thoughts may be seen in "Marmion." At his Edinburgh home, however, in the outset of his career, the spell of literary acquisition was constantly upon him. His eager soul coveted and mastered every book within the reach of his hand. Pope's translation of Homer, and the songs of Allan Ramsay, were among the first of his poetic readings. These gave him his primal, exquisite sense of the heroic and the natural, and laid perhaps the early foundations of that perfected taste which led him to become the pre-eminent expositor of both. The common interest felt by children for the wonderful and the terrible grew upon his comprehension, until Romance, with him, was but another name for Life. The career of Scott, as a student, was commenced at the grammar or high school of Edinburgh, in 1779. The principal, Mr. Luke Frazer, under whom he spent three years, in liberal acquirement, was a good Latin scholar, and a worthy person. He then entered the Rector's class, taught by Dr. McAdamand the road to learning which he travelled under that teacher, was McAdamized much to his satisfaction. After having finished his course in the class superintended by this gentleman, he should have proceeded at once to college, but his delicate health made a sojourn in the country necessary. He, therefore, repaired to Kelso near the Tweed, where a kind aunt had her residence. Here his intercourse with nature was renewed; and influences were at work around him, without whose subtle, but imperceptible action, all the lore of the schools, exerted to make him a poet and a novelist, had been in vain. He attended for about four hours a day upon the village grammar schoolhearing the inferior classes in the character of usher, and indulging in puns against the grand bashaw of the institution, one Launcelot Whale, whose ichthyological name gave rise to many attempts at the double meaning of which it was found susceptible. Master and pupil pleased each other, and the latter was extremely grateful for the benefits accruing to himself from the connection. What he did beside is best told in his own words. "In the mean while my acquaintance with English literature was gradually extending itself. In the intervals of my school hours I had always perused with avidity such books of history or poetry or voyages and travels as chance presented to me-not forgetting the usual, or rather ten times the usual, quantity of fairy tales, Eastern stories, romances, &c. These studies were totally unregulated and undirected. My tutor thought it almost a sin to open a profane play or poem; and my mother, besides that she might be in some degree tramelled by the religious scruples which he suggested, had no longer the opportunity to hear me read poetry as formerly. I found, however, in her dressing-room (where I slept at one time) some odd volumes of Shakspeare, nor can I easily forget the rapture with which I sat up in my shirt reading them by the light of a fire in her apartment, until the bustle of the family rising from supper warned me it was time to creep back to my bed, where I was supposed to have been safely deposited since nine o'clock. Chance, however, threw in my way a poetical preceptor. This was no other than the excellent and benevolent Dr. Blacklock, well known at that time as a literary character. I know not how I attracted his attention, and that of some of the young men who boarded in his family; but so it was that I became a frequent and favoured guest. The kind old man opened to me the stores of his library, and through his recommendation I became intimate with Ossian and Spenser. I was delighted with both, yet I think chiefly with the latter poet. The tawdry repetitions of the Ossianic phraseology disgusted me rather sooner than might have been expected from my age. But Spenser I could have read for ever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society. As I had always a wonderful facility in retaining in my memory whatever verses pleased me, the quantity of Spenser's stanzas which I could repeat was really marvellous. But this memory of mine was a very fickle ally, and has, through my whole life, acted merely upon its own capricious motion, and might have enabled me to adopt old Beattie of Meikledale's answer, when complimented by a certain reverend divine on the strength of the same faculty:-'No, sir,' answered the old Borderer, 'I have no command of my memory. It only retains what hits my fancy, and probably, sir, if you were to preach to me for two hours, I would not be able when you finished to remember a word you had been saying.' My memory was precisely of the same kind; it seldom failed to preserve most tenaciously a favourite passage of poetry, a playhouse ditty, or, above all, a Borderraid ballad; but names, dates, and the other technicalities of history, escaped me in a most melancholy degree. The philosophy of history, a much more important subject, was also a sealed book at this period of my life; but I gradually assembled much of what was striking and picturesque in historical narrative; and when, in riper years, I attended more to the deduction of general principles, I was furnished with a powerful host of examples in illustration of them. I was, in short, like an ignorant gamester, who kept up a good hand until he knew how to play it." The same ardent species of passion which he felt for Spenser, is traced to other sources of the eventful and the romantic, in the paragraphs ensuing. "Among the valuable acquisitions I made about this time was an acquaintance with Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, through the flat medium of Mr. Hoole's translation. But, above all, I then first became acquainted with Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry. As I had been from infancy devoted to legendary lore of this nature, and only reluctantly withdrew my attention, from the scarcity of materials and the rudeness of those which I possessed, it may be imagined, but cannot be described, with what delight I saw pieces of the same kind which had amused my childhood, and still continued in secret the Delilahs of my imagination, considered as the subject of sober research, grave commentary, and apt illustration, by an editor who showed his poetical genius was capable of emulating the best qualities of what his pious labour preserved. I remember well the spot where I read these volumes for the first time. It was beneath a huge platanus tree, in the ruins of what had been intended for an old-fashioned arbour in the garden I have mentioned. The summer day sped onward so fast, that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was in this instance the same thing, and henceforth I overwhelmed my schoolfellows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragical recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I could scrape a few shillings together, which were not common |