JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART, born 1794; died 1854. Published Valerius: A Roman Story, 1821. Adam Blair, 1822. Reginald Dalton, 1823. Life of Scott, 1837-38. He contributed to Blackwood's Magazine from its beginning, and became editor of the Quarterly Review in 1824. JAMES HOGG, the Ettrick Shepherd, born 1770; died 1835. Published Poems (chiefly songs), 1801. The Mountain Bard, 1807. The Forest Minstrel, 1810. The Queen's Wake, 1813. Also a great number of short poems and tales at various dates. CHAPTER III. WALTER SCOTT. WHILE the young men of the Edinburgh Review were setting out upon their bold enterprise from the neglected side of the Parliament House, and avenging their Whiggery, oddly enough, not upon its opponents, but upon the poets of their own party, another young advocate in Edinburgh belonging to the other side was slowly becoming known among his peers as possessing abilities beyond the common level, though no such brilliancy as that which flashed out, in sight of all the world, in the great Review. Walter Scott was the son of an Edinburgh Writer to the Signet, a respectable Scotch lawyer-with a traceable descent from the Scotts of Harden, and all the advantage of known and honourable connections; but he was no better off than his contemporaries, except in so far that he had a fair prospect of the rewards and encouragements then exclusively appropriated by his party in politics. He had been brought up, like all the rest, at the High School, after a dreamy and delightful childhood, chiefly spent in the country, where unconsciously he must have taken into his heart that world of rural life, with all its sights and sounds, the ewe-milkers, the farm labourers, the peasant race which no one has ever understood more completely; and at the same time all the traditions and ballads that floated about the countryside-a lore as then neither prized nor chronicled, but dear to every fresh youthful spirit, and doubly dear to the boy whose ancestors had figured in the stirring dramas of the Border, and whose life was to be influenced throughout by their inspiration. Permitted as a child, by a partially invalid condition, the privilege of constant reading, he had called himself a "virtuoso" at a very early age, and claimed kindred with other readers and thinkers, to the great amusement of his family. At school, however, not even his lameness kept him back from a vigorous share in all the sports and frays of his comrades; and though the poetical side of his character was visible in many an hour of youthful leisure, it was not of a kind to obtrude itself upon the general eye. It revealed itself in summer holidays, when he would climb, with a cherished friend and a book, high up among the cliffs of Arthur's Seat, and there, seated in a mossy corner, read the long evening through, while the light of the northern day lingered over the wide landscape. "He read faster than I," says the companion of these silent hours, "and had on this account to wait a little at finishing every two pages before turning the leaf." What thoughts must have been in the young reader's mind as he “waited a little" while his slower comrade plodded on-and lifting his young eyes with all the light of genius in them, looked abroad, still with the fumes of the poetry in his head, over that wonderful landscape, the most picturesque of cities at his feet, the soft steeps of St. Leonard's close at hand, and far away the blue distant Firth with its islands, and the low hills of Fife. "Where's the coward that would not dare To fight for such a land?"— these very words, one can imagine, must have been in his mind as he lay on the grass, with all the confused delicious dreams of a young fancy floating in his mind, and some vague previsions, who can doubt, of the wonders to come? It was not Jeffrey, we may be sure, or any other intellectualist, who accompanied young Walter on those lingering summer evenings, and laboured after him page by page; but there is no scene in his youthful life more delightful to contemplate than this, in which, as in Coleridge's most lovely poem, "All influences of soul and sense" mingle-the breathless pause in the reading, which was Spenser perhaps, the survivor remembers, or the Decameron "The music and the doleful tale, The rich and balmy eve" and that scene in which the charm of natural beauty and grandeur combined with the passionate and visionary patriotism of youth. Scott has been called a dunce at school, but this, he is himself careful to point out, was not the case. "For myself," he says, "I glanced like a meteor from one end of the class to the other, and commonly disgusted my kind master as much by negligence and . frivolity, as I occasionally pleased him by flashes of intellect and talent." He was already the storyteller of the little community; and "in the winter playhours, 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." When he was fifteen he saw Burns-a wonderful incident in his life; and in return for a piece of information which nobody else knew, the name of a little known author, received a kind word and a glance from those eyes, which were like no eyes he had ever seen in any mortal head, as he afterwards recorded. At a later period he is supposed to have received from another hand a mystic touch in the dark which made him a poet. This was conveyed to him by Mrs. Barbauld, who had brought with her on a visit to Edinburgh the translation of Bürger's Lenore, which William Taylor of Norwich, one of the first to open up the mysteries of German literature to the English reader, had lately written; the lady read this to Dugald Stewart-who, on his side, repeated as much of it as he could remember in the hearing of young Scott. The fragment, as recollected by the popular and beloved professor, and especially the two vigorous lines struck Scott's imagination greatly. "This, madam," he is reported to have said long afterwards to a member of ⚫ the Norwich circle which worshipped Taylor, "was what made me a poet. I had several times attempted the VOL. II. H |