66 TRANSLATION OF LENORE. 401 he was very popular, on account of his powers as a story-teller. We should not forget, however, that he won Dr. Adam's attention by some clever poetical versions from Horace and Virgil. Indiscriminate reading was the grand passion of his boyhood. He tells us how he found some odd volumes of Shakspere in his mother's dressingroom, where he sometimes slept, and with what absorbing delight he sat in his shirt reading them by the light of the fire, until he heard the noise of the family rising from the supper-table. Spenser, too, was an especial favourite with him, read many a time, during holiday hours, in some sheltered nook of Salisbury Craigs or the Blackford Hills. After a short attendance at the Latin, Greek, and Logic classes of the Edinburgh University, he was apprenticed to his father in 1786. Of Greek he knew next to nothing. He was well read in Shakspere and Milton; but took especial delight in such writers as Spenser, Boccaccio, and Froissart. Nothing, he says, but his strong taste for historical study, a study that never grew weak, saved his mind at this time from utter dissipation. A dangerous illness, arising from the bursting of a blood-vessel, which occurred about the second year of his apprenticeship, gave him several months of almost uninterrupted reading, and deepened the colouring caught from old chivalrous romance, which remained to the last the characteristic of his mind. When his apprenticeship was duly served, he studied for the bar, and in July 1792 donned the wig and gown of a Scottish advocate. But this honourable garb was to him little more than a matter of form; for the practice of law, which never yielded him £200 a year, was soon given up for more congenial and illustrious toils. The literary career of Scott opens with the publication of his Translations from Bürger. The study of German having become fashionable in Edinburgh some years earlier, Scott, with other young lawyers, loungers of the "Mountain," as their idling bench in the Parliament House was called, formed a class for the study of that language. Having heard of "Lenore," the young student procured a copy, and one night after supper sat down to translate the thrilling tale. It was published, with "The Wild Huntsman," a rendering from the same author, in the autumn of 1796. 26 (15) 1796 A.D A cottage at Lasswade soon received Scott and his young French bride, whose maiden name was Charlotte Carpenter, or Charpentier; and there the lawyer-poet lived happily by the lovely Esk, occasionally varying his literary labours by the stirring details of military drill on Portobello sands; for he now wore scarlet, as quarter-master of the Edinburgh Light Horse. We all know how the galloping and wheeling of these cavalry drills, with braying trumpets, flashing steel, and the wild excitement of the headlong charge, must have kindled martial fire in the breast of the author of "Marmion." A.D. In 1799 Scott was appointed, by the influence of the Duke of Buccleuch, Sheriff-deputy of Selkirkshire, poetically called Ettrick Forest. With the income of this office-£300 a year 1804 and some little fortune held by his wife, he soon established himself at the farm of Ashestiel on the Tweed, not far from the Yarrow, a literary man now by profession. This house, where he resided for the greater part of nearly eight years, stood in an old-fashioned garden fenced with holly hedges, and on a high bank, which was divided from the river he loved so well only by a narrow strip of green meadow. Already he had raised his name in literary circles by the publication of several noble ballads and three volumes of the Border Minstrelsy, filled partly with original poems, but chiefly with pieces gathered during those tours in southern Scotland, which he called his "raids into Liddesdale." His life at Ashestiel may serve as a specimen of his routine to the last, when he was in the country. Rising at five, he lit his own fire (if it was cold weather), dressed with care, and went out to see his favourite horse. At six he was seated at his desk in his shooting-jacket, or other out-of-doors garb, with a dog or two couched at his feet. There he wrote till breakfast-time, at nine or ten; and by that hour he had, in his own words, "broken the neck of the day's work." A couple of hours after breakfast were also given to the pen, and at twelve he was "his own man"-free for the day. By one he was on horseback, with his greyhounds led by his side, ready for some hours' coursing; or he was gliding "THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL." * 403 in a boat over some deep pool on Tweed, salmon-spear in hand, watching in the sunlight for a silver-scaled twenty-pounder. Such sports, varied with breezy rides by green glen and purple moorland, closed the day, whose early hours had been given to the battle of Flodden, or the romantic wanderings of Fitzjames. A.D. It was at Ashestiel that his first great poem-The Lay of the Last Minstrel was completed. Published in January 1805, this noble picture of the wild Border life of by- 1805 gone days raised the Sheriff of Ettrick Forest to an exalted rank among British poets. The grey-haired Harper, who timidly turned his weary feet towards the iron gate of Newark, and tuned his harp to such glorious strains, is one of the finest creations of our poetical literature. This tale was but the first of a series of picturesque romances, couched in flowing verse of eight syllables, and coloured with the brightest hues of Highland and knightly life, that proceeded during the next ten years from Scott's magic pen. Of these enchanting poems we shall here name only Marmion and The Lady of the Lake. Another important work of this period was his Life and Works of Dryden, which, published in eighteen volumes in 1808, cost him much toil during the three years he spent upon it. The dream of being a Tweedside laird began, with his brightening fame and growing wealth, to take a definite shape. In 1806 he had been appointed one of the Clerks of Session, in room of old Mr. Home; promotion which did not at once increase his income, but gave him the prospect of £800 a year, in addition to his salary as sheriff, upon the death of his predecessor. Accordingly, he purchased the farm of Clarty-Hole, consisting of about a hundred acres, stretch- 1811 ing for half a mile along the Tweed, not far from the A.D. foot of the Gala. This ill-named and not very wellfavoured spot formed the nucleus of Abbotsford. One piece of neighbouring land after another was added, a mansion was built, which has been called "a Gothic romance embodied in stone and mortar,”—the bare banks of Tweed were clothed with In that day even sheriffs plied the leister. * 404 THE VISION OF A HAND. plantations of young wood, and the fair dream of the poet's life was fast shaping itself into a grand and apparently solid reality. But this is all in anticipation of our story. The year after his removal to Abbotsford, which took place in 1812, a letter from the Lord Chamberlain offered him the laureateship, in the name of the Prince Regent. This honour Scott declined with respectful thanks. He was meanwhile toiling hard at his Life and Works of Dean Swift. But a power, greater than even himself was conscious of, had lain all this time sleeping in his brain. Fragments of an historical tale in prose, which was designed to give a picture of old Scottish life and manners, had been lying for years in his cabinet, when one day, as he was searching for some fishing-tackle, he came upon the almost forgotten sheets. It was then the autumn of 1813. Though engaged in finishing his edition of Swift, he set to work upon the tale. The greater part of the first volume was done during the ensuing Christmas vacation, and "the evenings of three summer weeks" completed the remaining two. A gay party of young men were sitting over their wine in a house in George Street upon one of those summer evenings, when the host drew attention to a window, where a solitary hand appeared, working without stay or weariness at a desk, and tossing down page after page of manuscript upon a rising heap. "It is the same every night," said young Menzies; "I can't stand the sight of it when I am not at my books. Still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be till candles are brought in, and nobody knows how long after that." It was Walter Scott's hand, writing the last volumes of "Waverley," seen as he sat in a back room of that house in North Castle Street-No. 39--which was long his Edinburgh residence. July 7, 1814 When the work was finished, the manuscript was copied by John Ballantyne, in whose printing concern Scott had, many years earlier, become a partner; and then Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since, was given to the world, but without the author's name. A cruise on board the Lighthouse yacht to Shetland and Orkney and round among the Hebrides, which filled two summer months of the same year, A.D. supplied him with materials for his fine poem, The Lord of the Isles, published in the following January. The success of "Waverley" was immediate and remarkable, although it appeared in what publishers call the dead season. "Who wrote the nameless book?" became the great literary question of the day; and when, from the same hidden hand, there came a series of new novels, brilliant and enchaining as no novels had ever been before, the marvel grew greater still. Most carefully was the secret kept. One of the Ballantynes always copied the manuscript before it was sent to press. For a time Scott was not suspected, owing to the mass of other literary work he got through; but, in Edinburgh at least, long before his own confession at the Theatrical Fund Dinner in 1827 rent a then transparent veil, the authorship of the Waverley novels was no mystery. Elated by this success, and feeling like a man who had come suddenly upon a rich and unwrought mine of gold, Scott began to build and to plant at Abbotsford, and to buy land with all the earnestness of a most hopeful nature. His industry never relaxed; nor did his public duties ever suffer from the severe desk-toil that he went through every day. While Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and many other works, were in progress, he sat daily during the winter and spring in the Court of Session, attended to his duties as Sheriff, gave dinners in Castle Street, or went to "refresh the machine" and entertain his friends at Abbotsford. Never had a hard-working littérateur so many hours to give to his friends. When the morning's task was over in the little back parlour in Castle Street—a neat and orderly room, with its blue morocco books in dustless regularity, and its well-used silver ink-stand shining as if newhe took his drive, or frolicked with his dogs, until it was time to show his bright and happy face in the drawing-room of some friend. And at Abbotsford there was no difference in the deskwork; but when that was done, he went with the ardour of a boy into the sports and pleasures of rural life, or walked out among his young trees with his unfailing retinue of dogs frisking about his feet. And none was happier than that hard-featured and |