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  MENTOR GRAVURES MENTOR GRAVURES LUCY AND THE MASTER FLORA MacIVOR "The Bride of Lammermoor" "Waverley" THE BLACK KNIGHT AT THE HERMITAGE MEG MERRILIES DIRECTS BERTRAM TO THE CAVE "Ivanhoe" "Guy Mannering" VARNEY, LEICESTER AND AMY ROBSART EFFIE DEANS AND GEORDIE "Kenilworth" "Heart of Midlothian" Bust of
Sir Walter
Scott By
Sir Francis
Chantrey

THE MENTOR · DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE
SEPTEMBER 15, 1916

Entered as second-class matter March 10, 1913, at the postoffice at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1916, by The Mentor Association, Inc.

A NOTED English critic said that he never sat down to write about Sir Walter Scott without a sense of elation and happiness; and he might have added without a sense of satisfaction. For the author of the Waverley Novels was a clean, wholesome, loyal human soul. The out-of-door vigor of the Highlands found in him not only a chronicler but an incarnation. At the end, when his strength was failing, his brain becoming darkened, the battle apparently going against him, his struggle against disaster became a moral victory and his character took on heroic proportions. At a time when so much writing is impaired by egotism, and mental and moral disease give prose and verse the odor of the hospitals, Scott brings a tonic atmosphere with him.

He was a fortunate man; he was born in a country which he understood, at a time when the men, women, and events he wrote about were in the past but not too far in the past; and he was well born in the best sense. He came at the right time, in the right place, and of the right ancestry. In a word, he was in harmony with the conditions of his life, and he was spared the antagonism which often bends and sometimes breaks a promising talent and distorts a wholesome nature. Like Goethe he had a methodical father, of orderly habit, and a mother of generous heart, a vivid memory and the gift of pictorial talk. He said of her that if he had been able to paint past times it was largely because of "the studies with which she presented me." She had talked with a man who remembered the battle of Dunbar; and the day before her last illness she told, with great accuracy of detail, the real story of the Bride of Lammermoor, and indicated the points in which it differed from her son's famous novel. To his father Scott owed his steadiness of aim and his indomitable industry; to his mother he owed his vivid energy of mind, his tireless curiosity.

To Scotland his debt was even greater. Born in Edinburgh in 1771, four years before the beginning of the American Revolution, an illness in his second year sent him to reside with his grandfather in a country of crags and in the neighborhood of a ruined tower. In fine weather the shepherd took him to the places where the sheep were grazing and laid him on the ground among them. He was forgotten one day, and a thunderstorm broke on him. When he was found he was calling out, "bonny! bonny!" at each flash of lightning. His illness made him lame for life, but he was a boy of sweet temper and a winning disposition. Lameness did not daunt him; he learned to climb with great agility and to keep his saddle with the best of them. At the age of six he was reciting ballads with zest and fire, and he showed very early the spirit which made him a story-teller and a man of dauntless courage.

The Boyhood of Scott

At school he was noted as a daring climber, a pertinacious fighter, an irregular student, and a teller of fascinating tales. In the High School he was "more distinguished in the yards than in the class." In 1783 he entered the Humanity and Greek classes in the University of Edinburgh, but his education was directed by his genius rather than by the school and college curriculum. He began on his grandfather's farm, Sandy-Knowe, in a landscape that runs to the Cheviot Hills and the slopes of Lammermoor, where he lay, a "puir lame laddie," on the turf among the sheep. Out of a volume of Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany" he was taught "Hardy Knute," long before he could read the ballad. "It was the first poem I ever learned," he wrote years afterwards, "the last I shall ever forget." His grandmother knew all the wild and romantic stories of the Border and the eager boy listened with his heart and imagination. He had only to look across the countryside to see many of the places where these moving events had happened: the peaks of Peebleshire, the crags of Hume, the landmarks of Ettrick and Yarrow; the Brethren Stanes were among the objects that "painted the earliest images on the eye of the last and greatest of the Border Minstrels."

When he was thirteen years old he came upon one of those books that open the world of imagination to boys and girls of genius. He was visiting his aunt in Kelso, which he describes as the most beautiful if not the most romantic village in Scotland. The house stood in a garden in which there was a great platanus tree (plane tree), and under its branches, one summer afternoon, he opened "Percy's Reliques," which had appeared nineteen years before, and the magic of the old, stirring ballads which Bishop Percy had piously brought together, laid a spell upon him which was never broken. "The summer day sped onward so fast," he wrote long afterwards, "that notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet." As soon as he could "scrape five shillings together" he bought the volumes and read no other books so often or with such enthusiasm.

This vital education for the work he was to do was not interrupted by his studies at the University. Hosts of Americans have climbed Arthur's Seat and picked bluebells and looked down on one of the most