began even then to be tributary to his imagination and his moral being. For what an image of the poet's childhood is presented in the tradition illustrative of such influences, which tells of his having been one day forgotten among the knolls in a thunder-storm, and being found lying on his back, clapping his hands at the lightning, and crying out "Bonny! bonny !" at every flash!

Another part of his education consisted of the old songs and tales familiar to his daily companions as the lore appropriate to the spot itself; for the summit overhanging the farm-house commanded the prospect of a district of which it was said every field had its battle and every rivulet its song. With these the child became familiar, thus, no doubt, acquiring much before he could read. But, besides his communings with the outward world, and with the minstrelsy with which, it may be almost said without exaggeration, the air was filled, there is one reminiscence which shows that his mind must early have dwelt with some earnestness on the pages of books. A lady writes to Mr. Lockhart that she distinctly remembers a sickly boy sitting at the gate of the house of one of his relatives, with his attendant, when a poor mendicant approached, old and woe-begone, to claim alms. When the man was retiring, the servant remarked to Walter that he ought to be thankful to Providence for having placed him above the want and misery he had been contemplating. The child looked up with a half-wistful, half-incredulous expression, and said, "Homer was a beggar." "How do you know that?" said the other. "Why, don't you remember," answered he,

"Seven Roman cities strove for Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begged his bread"?"

The lady smiled at the "Roman cities;" but already

"Each blank in faithless memory void

The poet's glowing thoughts supplied."

This is a small matter, and so, in one sense, are all things respecting children; but there seems to us a ray of true genius in such thinking of so mere a child,—the finding in beggary an association between the idea of Homer and the mendicant, and then by a process of imagination investing the Scotch pauper with somewhat of the dignity of the prince of bards.

With Scott, the influence of tuition—that which is often exclusively styled education-bore an unusually small proportion to the self-education on which his genius chiefly relied. This was, perhaps, in some measure of necessity the case, for the ordinary school-process, at first delayed by his bodily infirmity, was interrupted by the general feebleness of his health. The boy, however, had acquired an impetuous love for reading, and the bent of his intellect was shown by the mastery he gained over the region of imaginative literature. While yet a mere stripling, he had peopled his mind with the old romances, the legendary poetry, the "Arabian Nights," and the loftier visions of the English poets. All this was undirected; and it was only a turn for historical pursuits, which never forsook him, that he conceived saved his mind from utter dissipation. Still, the boy's appetite for works of imagination, fierce as it was, was too healthy to feed on trashy fictions. His spirit, taking its first impulse from the Border-song, then roved at will through the fantastic realms of Oriental fiction, the gorgeous gallery of the

Fairy Queen," the spheres of the "Paradise Lost," and the world revealed upon the pages of Shakspeare.

An interesting evidence of the extent of Scott's early reading, comprehensive not only of the chief English poets, but of many of inferior rank, may be noticed in his reminiscence of his one interview, if it may be so called, with his great predecessor Burns. When the peasantpoet, then in the full flush of his fame, paid his first visit to Edinburgh, Walter Scott was a lad of about fifteen years of age, and was present, on one occasion, when Burns was entertained in the most accomplished society of the Scottish metropolis. There chanced to be shown a print representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting on the one side, and on the other his widow with a child in her arms; underneath these lines :

"Cold on Canadian hills or Minden's plain,
Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain,
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew.
The big drops, mingling with the milk he drew,
Gave the sad presage of his future years,

The child of misery baptized in tears."

Burns was much affected by the print, and asked whose the lines were. It chanced that nobody remembered, except young Walter Scott, that they occurred in a scarcely-known poem by Langhorne. He modestly whispered the information to a friend, who mentioned it to Burns. The kind look with which it was acknowledged was a pleasurable recollection for Scott many a year after.

Scott's poetical character was not only greatly fashioned by the influence of the traditionary minstrelsy, but it was impregnated by an intense nationality; and this may also

be traced to a very early period of his consciousness. During his residence at the farm-house, besides the borderlegends, the mingled fact and fiction of a remote age, the child's thoughts were made familiar with the nearer story of the sufferings of his countrymen some thirty years before, in the Rebellion of 1745. The vengeance which triumphant England wreaked upon Scotland was freshly remembered by many; and, as the child listened to the narratives of the atrocities which fastened on the victor the horrid title of the "Butcher Cumberland," there sprang from his childish sympathy a deep affection for his injured country. The smouldering fires of Scottish resentment had burst forth in two wide-spread rebellions in support of the banished family of Stuart, and the power of England over the prostrate cause of the Pretender was maintained by the bloody penalties which followed the victory at Culloden. The Duke of Cumberland, hardened in the trade of war, carried English vengeance into every sphere of life: the cottage-hearths were wet with slaughter, and the sounds that went up from the glens of Scotland were the shrieks and the death-moans of famishing women and children. In the language of Smollett's fine lyric, uttered at the time,

"When the rage of battle ceased,
The victor's soul was not appeased:
The naked and forlorn must feel
Devouring flames and conquering steel!
No strains but those of sorrow flow,
And nought is heard but sounds of woe;
Whilst the pale phantoms of the slain
Glide nightly o'er the silent plain."

Now, it was in this history that the infant spirit of

E

Walter Scott was nursed; and it is no marvel that thus was kindled in his breast a fervid Scottish feeling, that went out only with the flame of life. It entered into his childish games, as described in one of the poetical epistles prefaced to "Marmion :"

"While, stretched at length upon the floor,

Again I fought each battle o'er;

Pebbles and shells in order laid
The mimic ranks of war displayed;
And onward still the Scottish Lion bore,

And still the scattered Southron fled before."

From his childhood Walter Scott was trained to be in all his heart a Scotchman. There was much the same feeling as kindled the early aspirations of Burns :—

"E'en then a wish, (I mind its power,)

A wish that to my latest hour

Shall strongly heave my breast,—
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake
Some usefu' plan or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least."

Walter Scott's poetry is full of this spirit of nationality, -a mixture of national pride and that peculiar feeling, the filial piety of her children for "poor auld Scotland."

Scott's love of natural scenery, especially when associated with historic incidents, had its origin, no doubt, when he was residing in childhood at the farm-house amid the romantic localities at Sandy Knowe. A part of his boyhood was spent in another romantic neighbourhood, within sight of the meeting of two superb rivers,—the Tweed and Teviot, both renowned in song,—the ruins of an ancient abbey, and the more distant vestiges of Roxburgh Castle. "To this period," he writes, "I can trace dis