Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

INTRODUCTION

LIFE OF SCOTT

SOME authors are best introduced to us through their writings; others are the best introduction to their writings. Of the latter class there is no more striking representative than Sir Walter Scott, poet and romancer, whose ancestral blood tingled with the poetic traditions of Bonnie Scotland, and into whose inmost being, from earliest childhood, had been breathed the romance of the Highlands. Ancestry. - The Scotts of Harden had been famous even among border chieftains for their reckless riding and fighting, ever since the day in 1567 when "Auld Wat," sung in a hundred ballads, brought lovely Mary Scott, the "Flower of Yarrow," to his fastness at Harden Tower, by "Teviot's western strand." It is told that at the wedding feast, when the last English bullock had been devoured, this same bride of Yarrow placed on the table for dessert a dish containing a pair of new spurs. That was a graceful suggestion that the assembled guests should make no further tarrying, but provide themselves with their next dinner by means of a fresh raid. The son and heir of this worthy couple kept up his father's reputation by his forays, in one of which he was cap

tured by Sir Gilbert Murray, and only saved from hanging upon the suggestion from the Baron's more kindly dame, that young Scott was well-to-do and the Murrays had three unmarried daughters. The prisoner immediately signed, upon a drumhead, a contract to marry the ugliest of the three," Mickle-mouthed Meg." Their grandson, the great-grandfather of our Sir Walter, spent his energies for the banished Stuarts, instead of in lifting English cattle. Introduced in Marmion (Intro., Canto VI., 1. 95) —

"With amber beard and flaxen hair,
And reverend apostolic air,"

he was called "Beardie" because, in token of his mourning for the lost cause, he refused to employ a razor until Prince Charlie should come into his own again.

With him end the wild tales of adventure; for his son was a cheery sheep-farmer, and managed his cattle exchanges legitimately, while the next of line, Walter Scott, Senior, was a city man, a plodding and prudent writer to the Signet. This sensible and somewhat formal gentleman married Miss Anne Rutherford, the well-educated and warm-hearted daughter of a professor of medicine in Edinburgh University. She became the mother of twelve children, of whom five outlived early youth. Walter, the ninth, was born on the 15th of August, 1771, in a house at the head of old College Wynd in Edinburgh.

Contemporaries. Scott was one of the first great writers of that wonderful decade 1770-1779, which gave to the world Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, Landor, Campbell, and Moore; and which saw the death of

Gray and Goldsmith. It was the decade as well when poor Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette climbed the tottering French throne; when Frederick the Great was laying firmly the foundations of modern Prussia; when Warren Hastings was securing India for the Anglo-Saxon; and when John Hancock and the Adamses, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were launching our American Ship of State.

Childhood. The baby soon proved to be delicate, and took his teething so hard that the resulting fever produced a lifelong lameness. So, as soon as he could toddle, he was sent to his grandfather at Sandy Knowe. The nurse, being ill-tempered to the verge of insanity, was soon discharged, and the child turned over in fair weather to the shepherds and a kindly old soldier-friend. He is pictured lying in the skin of a freshly killed sheep, on the turf among the lambs, gazing at the surrounding crags. Dryburgh Abbey, his final resting-place, fair Melrose, the stretch of Lammermoor, the purple Eildon peaks, and the distant Cheviot range, were stamped indelibly upon his inner vision. Sometimes he was forgotten, and once his aunt found the little one out in a thunder storm, clapping his hands at every flash, and shouting, "Bonny, bonny!" He is described as a winsome bairn, with bright brown hair, merry yet determined light blue eyes, the somewhat conical forehead we know so well in his portraits, and the long upper lip and expansive mouth inherited from his great-great-greatgrandmother, Meg Murray. His expression was as sweet and spirited as his temper, showing the mingled depth

and vivacity of his nature. In spite of his lameness, he was throughout life exceptionally agile and fond of active sports. Eventually he attained what he calls "the greatest blessings which earth can bestow, a sound and healthy mind with a good constitution."

Education. After his grandfather's death in 1775, Walter was sent to various health resorts, and became so much improved that at the age of seven he entered the Edinburgh high school. Before this, however, he had received stanch Presbyterian training, and, what was more to his taste, learned many a border ballad. At the high school he was a somewhat idle pupil, though, under the inspiration of the rector, Dr. Adam, he received some praise for poetical translations of Vergil and Horace. It is needless to add that the learned schoolmaster claimed for himself most of the credit for his scholar's later achievements in literature. A tutor at home instructed the children in French and church history, besides furnishing an antagonist in the endless debates where Walter was a fiery Jacobite - taking his politics "as Charles II. did his religion, from an idea that the cavalier creed was the more gentlemanlike of the two." With the schoolboys his good nature and lively story-telling made him a prime favorite.

After leaving the high school, a few months with his aunt at Kelso, one of the most picturesque spots in all Scotland, gave time to become acquainted with Spenser, the open sesame of so many poets, and with odd plays of Shakespeare; most of all, it was during this vacation that he discovered Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry. Under

a spreading plane tree in his Aunt Janet's garden were born some of the brain children, that, grown to maturity, became the family whose eldest was the Minstrel of Branksome Tower, and the youngest, sad Count Robert of Paris.

From 1783 to 1786 Scott was in college at Edinburgh. There, as usual, he neglected the prescribed studies, to become absorbed in the acquisition of a vast amount of miscellaneous knowledge, especially knowledge concerning our older English poets, and concerning unfrequented nooks of medieval history. On May 15, 1786, the young student was apprenticed to his father for five years, under a mutual bond of forty pounds. It was the fashion then for every youth of good parts to study for the bar or divinity, and to this rather uncongenial apprenticeship he owed much of the methodical, painstaking habit which carried him through his later years. Moreover, he made good literary capital out of the humors of the law, and found time to read fluently Spanish, Italian, and German. At this period occurred also the only interview with his one rival in the hearts of his countrymen, Robert Burns, whom he thought to resemble "a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school."

[ocr errors]

Introduction to the Highlands. For several successive years business called Scott on trips to the Western Highlands; it was on one of these legal errands, while accompanied by six men and a sergeant who was armed with pistols and anecdotes of Rob Roy, that Walter Scott first saw Loch Katrine. And during the months when he was nominally confined within the city, every spare hour was

« AnteriorContinuar »