586 Sir Walter Scott. 



of diction he was content to dig on British soil. He had all he wanted in 

 the old wells of ' English undented/ and the still living, though fast shrink- 

 ing, waters of that sister idiom which had not always, as he flattered himself, 

 deserved the name of a dialect. 



" As may be said, I believe, with perfect truth of every really great man, 

 Scott was self-educated in every branch of knowledge which he ever turned 

 to account in the works of his genius and he has himself told us that his 

 real studies were those lonely and desultory ones of which he has given a 

 copy in the first chapter of Waverley, where the hero is represented as 'driving 

 through the sea of books, like a vessel without pilot or rudder ;' that is to say, 

 obeying nothing but the strong breath of native inclination/' Vol. i. p. 129 

 131. 



On the 15th of May, 1786, Walter Scott entered into his inden- 

 tures with his father; and he does not appear to have discharged 

 the routine business of the office with much more diligence than his 

 college studies. It was during the first or second year of his profes- 

 sional training, that Walter Scott visited the Highlands for the first 

 time ; and, however copious our citations may appear, they scarcely 

 need apology. 



" If he is quite accurate in referring his first acquaintance with the High- 

 lands to his fifteenth year, this incident also belongs to the first season of his 

 apprenticeship. His father had, among a rather numerous list of Highland 

 clients, Alexander Stewart of Invernahyle, an enthusiastic Jacobite, who had 

 survived to recount, in secure and vigorous old age, his active experiences in 

 the insurrections both of 1715 and 1745. He had, it appears, attracted 

 Walter's attention and admiration at a very early date ; for he speaks of 

 having ' seen him in arms' and heard him * exult in the prospect of drawing 

 his claymore once more before he died,' when Paul Jones threatened a descent 

 on Edinburgh ; which transaction occurred in September 1779. Invernahyle, 

 as Scott adds, was the only person who seemed to have retained possession 

 of his cool senses at the period of that disgraceful alarm, and offered the 

 magistrates to collect as many Highlanders as would suffice for cutting off 

 any part of the pirate's crew that might venture in quest of plunder into a 

 city full of high houses and narrow lanes, and every way well calculated for 

 defence. The eager delight with which the young apprentice now listened to 

 the tales of this fine old man's early days produced an invitation to his resi- 

 dence among the mountains, and to this excursion he probably devoted the 

 few weeks of an autumnal vacation whether in 1786 or 1787, it is of no 

 great consequence to ascertain. 



"I have often heard Scott mention some curious particulars of his first 

 visit to the remote fastness of one of these Highland friends ; but whether he 

 told the story of Invernahyle, or of one of his own relations of the Clan 

 Campbell, I do not recollect ; I rather think the latter was the case. On 

 reaching the brow of a bleak eminence overhanging the primitive tower and 

 its tiny patch of cultivated ground, he found his host and three sons, and 

 perhaps half-a-dozen attendant gillies, all stretched half-asleep in their tartans 

 upon the heath, with guns and dogs, and a profusion of game about them ; 

 while in the courtyard, far below, appeared a company of women, actively 

 engaged in loading a cart with manure. The stranger was not a little as- 

 tonished when he discovered, on descending from the height, that among 

 these industrious females were the laird's own lady, and two or three of her 

 daughters ; but they seemed quite unconscious of having been detected in an 

 occupation unsuitable to their rank retired presently to their 'bowers/ and 

 when they re-appeared in other dresses, retained no traces of their morning's 

 work, except complexions glowing with a radiant freshness, for one evening 

 of which many a high-bred beauty would have bartered half her diamonds. 



