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

6

'Seven Roman cities strove for Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begged his bread.'

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 had acquired, however, 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 romancesthe legendary poetry-the Arabian nights-and the loftier visions of the greatest 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 fictionthe gorgeous gallery of the Fairy Queen-the spheres of the Paradise Lost-and the world revealed upon the pages of Shakspeare. In this reading, unguided as it was, there was at least scope for that reaction of the faculties, so different from the natural slothfulness which makes ordinary novel reading hurtful alike to the imagination, the judgment, and the

morals. The genius of the boy, fastening upon what was adventurous and romantic, repudiated all that was akin to sickly sentimentality. In the account given in his first novel of the desultory studies of young Waverley, Scott drew, he has stated, a picture of his own early course of reading. In another of his romances, he has strangely neglected an opportunity of depicting the formation of youthful genius, that would have been one of the noblest themes for a philosophical imagination. In the descriptions in Kenilworth of Queen Elizabeth's celebrated visit to the castle of the Earl of Leicester, among the subjects of conversation, is the fame of England's great dramatic poet. Now in this there is a singular anachronism, for Shakspeare, at that period, had attained only twelve years of age. And it is a fact of some interest, that his birth place and home-Stratford upon Avon-was but a short distance from the scene of those princely festivities, and if Shakspeare was the boy we take him to have been, it is likely that he found his way there, and it may be regretted that Scott did not avail himself of this probability to present the youthful poet, mingling in the throng, a thoughtful boy, firing his genius by the light that blazed around the virgin queen. This could not have been done without leading the author into a deeper self-examination, as to the foundations of his own mind, than appear in that reflected image of his studies. in the pages of Waverley.

An influence on Scott's disposition, of a different kind from those noticed, may here be adverted to. His childhood had been spent under the mild tutelage of a grandmother, and of one who stood to him in that relation so dear to little people, a maiden aunt; in his own language, from one of those interesting poetical epistles prefatory to the cantos of Marmion, he

When from Sandy Knowe he came back to Edinburgh into his father's family, it was necessary for him to descend from what Charles Lamb calls the "regal solitude" of sickness to an equality with his companions. The petted invalid was stripped of his prerogatives, and his self-willed caprice soon set in conflict with the passions of others of the same age:

"Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy."

His lameness-the subject heretofore of naught but tender solicitude, became, to his bitter amazement, often the occasion of unfeeling ridicule. To this change may be ascribed a recoil in his feelings, which operated powerfully upon his character. To one nursed in the lap of affection, and familiar chiefly with the world of fancy, it was the first rude lesson for the strife of life, and probably laid the foundation of that fortitude in combating with adverse circumstances, which distinguished him through his career. Happily there was a native sweetness in his temper, which prevented bodily deformity, becoming to him, as to a celebrated contemporary, a perpetual source of morbid asperity; and indeed had he not portrayed in one of his novels-the Black Dwarf-the unhappy moral condition which may result from that cause, it might have been doubted whether such thoughts had ever passed through Scott's mind.

The fire that animated Scott's academic career was not the fire of ambition; he was content, he says, with a decent place about the middle of the class, especially as it happened to be near the stove. There were, however, flashes of his dawning genius; some lines composed by him are clever school-boy attempts at versification. But this promise of the future poet was faint to that which far more distinctly foreshadowed the author of Waverley. An imagination irrepressibly active, and unspoiled by Scotch metaphysics, from its fulness, poured into the ears of his admiring school-mates, tale after tale, in a fashion curiously typical of the future author with the larger audience of the civilized world. "He used to interest us," says a lady, who, when a little girl, had been one of his listeners, "in a serious way, by telling visions, as he called them, when kept from going to church on Sunday by ill-health." And James Ballantyne remembered, as a thing of daily occurrence, in the school at Kelso, Scott, after having mastered his own lesson, whispering, "Come, slink over beside me, Jamie, and I'll tell you a story." During his college life, a compact was made with a classmate, which led the two youths into the secluded spots in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, where they recited to each other interminable stories of the adventures of knights errant.

The most systematic part of Scott's education, was the

severe and invaluable discipline of his professional education for the bar, which greatly contributed, no doubt, to a fuller development of his reasoning powers, and also the formation of those habits of application-the ability of drudgery— which never failed him.

But there is a leading trait in Walter Scott's character, which is to be traced to the earliest period of his consciousness. During his residence at the farm-house, beside the border legends-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, after their defeat at Culloden. 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, and if we were to say what was the central principle of Scott's character, it would be an intense nationality. He was, in all his heart, a Scotsman. There was the same principle whch kindled the early aspirations of Burns:

"E'en then a wish, I mind its power,
A wish that to my latest hour

Will strongly heave my breast,
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake
Some usefu' plan or beuk should make,
Or sing a sang at least."

Between the spirit of a great author, and the country which is his abiding place, there is a correspondence which ought not to be overlooked in the illustration of character. The history of his nation gave a coloring to Scott's genius, and therefore let us look at so much of that history as may serve to show some of the historic elements of a Scotsman's pride, and of that peculiar feeling, the filial piety of her children to "poor auld Scotland."

The ancient people that dwelt in the north country was, it is well known, a distinct race from that which occupied England, and it is a Scotsman's boast, that his land was never conquered in war. The eagles of the Roman legions, that waved in victory over the Britons, were fluttered in the Highlands, and when, after the Roman, came the Saxon, the Dane,

and the Norman, each in turn, subjugating the south, Caledonia was still impregnable. It was not till after some centuries, · when an English monarch resorted to treachery, that Scottish independence was at all impaired; but the stain, which then for a season rested on it, was soon washed out with the English blood which was shed on the field of Bannockburn. At length, when the Plantagenet dynasty in England passed away, a daughter of the seventh Henry was wedded, it will be remembered, to James IV. of Scotland, thus uniting the Tudors of one kingdom with the Stuarts of the other. When that marriage was under negotiation, the counsellors of the English monarch warned him, that at some future day England might become an appendage to Scotland, but the reply of that crafty prince (recorded by Lord Bacon) showed a deeper wisdom-"No," said he, "Scotland will become an appendage to the English, for the smaller must follow the larger kingdom." The lapse of another century verified the prediction. We need not trace from that marriage the events which placed the Stuarts on the English throne, as the legitimate successors of the Tudors. The first step of Scotland's degradation from national sovereignity to a species of provincial union was, the loss of the visible presence of the king. Still it was an independent state, none the less for having given a monarch to England; she retained her separate and ancient legislature, until at last, corruption, brought to bear on some of her false sons, deprived her of these prerogatives by the act of union, in the year 1707, thus closing an independence which boasted an antiquity of two thousand years. The union of the crowns had engendered no union of the hearts of the two nations. It was no gain to Scotland that her own Stuarts were on the British throne; for they, especially two of them, one a misguided tyrant, the other a ribald profligate, became oppressors to the land of their forefathers. And the ruling principle of Scottish policy was hostility to England; she warred with the Stuarts when on the English throne, and clung to them when dethroned and in exile. At another time, it needed the iron energy of Cromwell to quell the Scottish mountaineers; and such was the impression of his fierce warfare for more than seventy years, a very aged Highlander said, that Oliver's colors were so strongly fixed in his memory, that he still thought he saw them spread out by the wind, and bearing the word Emanuel upon them in very large golden characters. The hostile feel