" A vigorous health seems to have been given him by nature, 

 yet as if nature had said withal, ' Let it be a health to express 

 itself by mind, not by body,' a lameness is added in childhood, so 

 the brave little boy, instead of romping and bickering must 

 learn to think, or, what is a great matter, to sit still." The 

 boy in his early youth delighted in the violet hills, the foam- 

 white burns, and " the velvet tufts of loveliest green," and he 

 drank in with the fresh, keen air of his native land the intense 

 love he bore for its people, history, romance and folk-lore. 



At School and University. 



From Sandyknowe he was taken to Edinburgh, and in due 

 time entered the High School. He never did much to dis- 

 tinguish himself there, at least within the class-rooms ; his 

 reputation was one of irregular ability, he " glanced like a meteor 

 from one end of the class to the olher." Out of school, in the 

 "yards," as he himself puts it, his fame stood more established 

 than in the class-rooms. At the age of thirteen he went to the 

 University, but for the teaching of the Professors he cared but 

 little. His real education as a poet and kindly teacher was not 

 acquired in the class-rooms or in his father's edifice. It was 

 rather gained in his walks through the Lothians and Border 

 country, bis excursions to Perthshire and the Highlands, his 

 raids, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horse-back, through the 

 wilds of Selkirk and Dumfries-shire. He was ever on tramp, 

 often engaged in harum-scarum enterprises, not infrequently 

 getting into scrapes, but always storing his memory with associ- 

 ations, romantic or humorous, which suggested themselves to 

 his luxuriant fancy. 



In the Law. 



In June, 1792, he was called to the Bar, but he does not 

 appear to have been veiy sanguine as to his prospects. After 

 the completion of the ceremony, he was in the company of his 

 friend William Clark, who had put on his gown at the same 

 time. Scott said to Clark, mimicking the air of a Highland 

 lassie, waiting at the Cross of Edinburgh to be liu-ed for harvest 

 work, " We've stood here an hour by the Tron, Hinny, and deil 

 a ane has speired our price," a sad experience that is not un- 

 familiar to some barristers of to-day. But his heart was not in this 

 work, and he met with only moderate success. We had rather 

 regard him as an author glorying in the exercise of his genius 

 than as a lawyer tired of the "dry and barren wilderness of 

 forms and conveyances." 



The Forms. 



Scott's genius did not mature until late in life, when he was 

 thirty-four years of age. He gave the world his first romance in 



