ture best suited to his needs contained in them. The small store of Greek, it is true, which he was taught at the University, he, in the lapse of years, managed to forget so utterly that he did not even know the letters; but he read Latin with fluency, and could peruse without difficulty any book written in French, German, Italian, or Spanish. Entering his father's office as apprentice in his fifteenth year, he managed so far to curb his restless energies as to go through with credit a fair amount of legal drudgery, acquiring, besides some knowledge of the technicalities of the law, those habits of method, punctuality, and laborious industry which afterwards were such a powerful auxiliary to him. His somewhat dry and mechanical duties as legal apprentice and budding advocate he diversified not only by reading, but by frequent excursions into the Highland and Lowland districts, acquiring there a rich store of traditions, and becoming acquainted with all those types of Scottish character which he was afterwards to delineate in imperishable colours. "He was makin' himsel a' the time," says one of his companions, speaking about those raids, "but he didna ken, maybe, what he was about till years had passed. At first he thought o' little, I daresay, but the queerness and

fun."

In 1792 Scott was admitted to the Scottish bar. Through the influence of his father he received enough employment to keep him from being entirely idle, but not nearly enough to occupy all the hours of so quick and energetic a worker. It is a wonder that Scott, with his great fondness for reading and his wonderful abilities, did not sooner make an entry into the fair realm of literature, which has afforded kindly aid to so many young subjects of Themis. It was not, however, till 1796 that he first appeared before the public as translator of Bürger's ballads "Lenore" and the "Wild Huntsman." These attracted considerable attention, and led to his contributing a few pieces to "Monk" Lewis's "Tales of Wonder," and to his translating in 1799 Goethe's "Götz von Berlichingen." Previous to the publication of the last-mentioned productions, Scott had married Miss Carpenter, the daughter

Scott's "Border Minstrelsy."

327

of a French refugee, who brought with her a small fortune. She was not his first love: before he met with her he had been deeply in love with a lady who afterwards became wife of Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo. His attachment was returned, but circumstances opposed their union, and their intercourse was broken off, leaving a wound in Scott's heart which the lapse of time was powerless altogether to heal. Whenever in any of his works he has occasion to mention an early and unfortunate "first love," he does so with peculiar tenderness and feeling.

In 1802 Scott published the first two volumes of the "Border Minstrelsy," printed by his old schoolfellow Ballantyne, who had set up in business in the pretty little town of Kelso, and the first important specimen of an afterwards famous press. There was no work of Scott's after-life which showed the result of so much preliminary labour. Before he was ten years old he had collected several volumes of ballads and traditions, and we have seen how diligently he pursued the same task in later years. The collection was admitted to be far more faithful, as well as more skilfully edited, than its prototype, the "Reliques" of Bishop Percy, while the notes contained a mass of information relative to Border life, conveyed in a style of beauty unprecedented in matters of this kind, and enlivened with a higher interest than that of fiction. Percy's "Reliques" had prepared the way for the kind reception of the Minstrelsy" by the general relish which-notwithstanding Dr. Johnson's protest-it had created for the simple pictures of a pastoral and heroic time. Burns had since familiarised the English ear with the Doric melodies of his native land; and now a greater than Burns appeared, whose first production, by a singular chance, had come into the world in the very year in which the Ayrshire minstrel was withdrawn from it, as if nature had intended that the chain of poetic inspiration should not be broken. The delight of the public was further augmented by the appearance of the third volume of the "Minstrelsy" (1803), containing various imitations. of the old ballads, which contained "all the rich fashion of

the antique, purified from the mould and rust by which the beauties of such weather-beaten trophies are defaced." The first edition was disposed of in less than a year; and on the publication of a second, the copyright was sold to Longman for £500-a very fortunate bargain for the publisher, as it proved.

Passing over minor writings, we come to the next important event in Scott's literary life,-the publication of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" in 1805. It met with a colossal and unprecedented success; edition after edition was called for; with a single bound Scott leaped to the position of the most popular poet of the day. There are several causes which combine to account for this extraordinary popularity. In the first place, the poem was original in subject and mode of treatment; the description of the old romantic past, in free and flowing verse, was felt as refreshing to those tired of poetical commonplace and conventionality as is the fresh air of the mountains to those long detained in stifling London drawing-rooms. Again, Scott's poems have what many greater poems want an interesting story, which, apart from their poetical beauties, keeps the reader's attention fixed.

third place, they do not require any thought or elaborate culture to understand them; their beauties are easily perceptible by all, as their popularity among schoolboys sufficiently attests. General intelligibility is one of the prime requisites of immediate popularity as a poet, though not of permanent fame; a fact of which the immense sale of Longfellow's writings in our day is a convincing illustration. The "Lay" was followed in 1808 by "Marmion," and in 1810 by the "Lady of the Lake," to which poem, with its fine descriptions of scenery, is mainly due the great influx of tourists every season to the Trossachs. With the "Lady of the Lake" Scott's popularity as a poet reached its zenith. His subsequent poems, the "Vision of Don Roderick," "Rokeby," the "Lord of the Isles," &c., were not so well received. “Well, James," said Scott to Ballantyne a few days after the publi cation of the "Lord of the Isles " in 1815, "I have given you

Scott and Abbotsford.

329 a week; what are people saying about the 'Lord of the Isles'?" Ballantyne hesitated a little, but Scott speedily brought the matter to a point. "Come," he said, "speak out, my good fellow; what has put it into your head to be on so much ceremony with me all of a sudden? But I see how it is; the result is given in one word,-disappointment." Ballantyne's silence admitted the inference to its fullest extent. As Scott had been wholly unprepared for the event, his countenance looked rather blank for a few seconds. At length he said, with perfect cheerfulness, "Well, well, James, so be it; but you know we must not droop, for we can't afford to give over. Since one line has failed, we must stick to something else." Thus, almost by chance, was Scott's genius driven into the line in which its highest triumphs were achieved. He had already, with characteristic caution, made his first essay in it.

year.

been tenfold

But before beginning the history of the wonderful Waverley series, we may glance a little at Scott's occupations and circumstances at this time. In many ways he had much cause to felicitate himself on his lot. In 1799 he was appointed Sheriff of Selkirkshire, with an annual salary of £300. Some years later he procured an appointment as one of the principal clerks of the Court of Session, worth about £1500 a Altogether, counting the interest of his small fortune, he had an income of about £2000, independent of his literary exertions, which brought him in large sums. Yet Scott was not a rich man; and though his income had what it was, would not have been a rich man. was not to write great works (he always regarded his literary faculty merely as a convenient means of filling his purse), not to acquire great fame as an author, but to be a large landed proprietor, the founder of a race of Scottish lairds. With this end in view he toiled late and early; he went through labours which in a short time would have brought a man of less vigorous constitution to the grave; he plunged himself in debt, and engaged in commercial transactions which finally proved his ruin. In 1812 he removed to Abbotsford, where he built and fitted up the fine mansion so closely associated

His ambition

with his name, and drained and planted the bleak moorland around at the cost of many thousands.. Cautious and judicious in everything else, he had a sort of craze for the purchase of land, and could no more resist the purchase of any plot of ground in tempting proximity to his estate of Abbotsford that was offered to him, than an opium-eater can withstand the fascinations of his favourite drug. The burning ambition to be a territorial magnate was a sad and pitiful one for a man of Scott's powers, but it carried with it a terrible revenge.

On a certain day in June 1814, while a party of young law students were chatting gaily in the library of a house in George Street, Edinburgh, a shade was observed to come over the countenance of their host. One of them having intimated a fear of his being unwell: "No," said he; “I shall be well enough presently, if you will only let me sit where you are and take my chair, for there is a confounded hand in sight of me here which has often bothered me before, and now it won't let me fill my glass with good-will." His companion rose to change places with him, and had pointed out to him this hand, which, like the writing on Belshazzar's wall, disturbed his host's hour of hilarity. "Since we sat down," he said, "I have been watching it; it fascinates my eye; it never stops; page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of manuscript, and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night; I can't stand a sight of it when I am not at my books." "Some stupid, dogged, engrossing clerk probably," exclaimed one of the youths. “No, boys," replied the host, "I know well what hand it is-'tis Walter Scott's." It was the hand of Walter Scott, busily engaged in his Castle Street lodging in writing the last two volumes of "Waverley "-a task which occupied him only three weeks. "Waverley" had been begun nine years before, in 1805 (hence the second title, "'Tis Sixty Years Since "), but the friend to whom Scott submitted what of it was then written did not speak of it in sufficiently high terms to encourage him to run the risk of somewhat dimming his poetic laurels by its publication.