Sir Walter Scott. 5S5 



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 re- 

 member 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 Border-raid ballad ; but names, 

 dates, and the other technicalities of history, escaped me in a most melan- 

 choly degree. The philosophy of histor)', 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." Vol. i. p. 35 37. 



Scott does not appear to have distinguished himself much more at 

 college than at school. Dunce he was, said Professor Dalzell, and 

 dunce was to remain ; but in that he was mistaken. It would be an 

 act of injustice here not to allow his biographer to speak for him 

 respecting his classical attainments, especially as the passage illus- 

 trates his early predilections. 



'* I shall only add to what he sets down on the subject of his early acade- 

 mical studies, that in this, as in almost every case, he appears to have under- 

 rated his own attainments. He had, indeed, no pretensions to the name of 

 an extensive, far less of an accurate, Latin scholar ; but he could read, I 

 believe, any Latin author, of any age, so as to catch without difficulty his 

 meaning ; and although his favourite Latin poet, as well as historian, in later 

 days, was Buchanan, he had preserved, or subsequently acquired, a strong 

 relish for some others of more ancient date. I may mention, in particular, 

 Lucan and Claudian. Of Greek, he does not exaggerate in saying that he 

 had forgotten even the alphabet ; for he was puzzled with the words aotog 

 and TToirjrrjg, which he had occasion to introduce, from some authority on his 

 table, into his * Introduction to Popular Poetry,' written in April 1830; and 

 happening to be in the house with him at the time, he sent for me to insert 

 them for him in his MS. Mr. Irving has informed us of the early period at 

 which he enjoyed the real Tasso and Ariosto. I presume he had at least as 

 soon as this enabled himself to read Gil Bias in the original ; and, in all pro- 

 bability, we may refer to the same time of his life, or one not much later, his 

 acquisition of as much Spanish as served for the Guerras Civiles de Granada, 

 Lazarillo de Tormes, and, above all, Don Quixote. He read all these lan- 

 guages in after-life with about the same facility. Of all these, as of German 

 somewhat later, he acquired as much as was needful for his own purposes, 

 of which a critical study of any foreign language made at no time any part. 

 In them he sought for incidents, and he found images j but for the treasures 



