Sir Walter Scott | Page 8

fourteen or fifteen hours' very hard work at the very
least,--expressly for this purpose.
In the second year of Scott's apprenticeship, at about the age of sixteen,
he had an attack of hæmorrhage, no recurrence of which took place for
some forty years, but which was then the beginning of the end. During
this illness silence was absolutely imposed upon him,--two old ladies
putting their fingers on their lips, whenever he offered to speak. It was
at this time that the lad began his study of the scenic side of history,
and especially of campaigns, which he illustrated for himself by the
arrangement of shells, seeds, and pebbles, so as to represent
encountering armies, in the manner referred to (and referred to
apparently in anticipation of a later stage of his life than that he was
then speaking of) in the passage from the introduction to the third canto
of Marmion which I have already given. He also managed so to arrange
the looking-glasses in his room as to see the troops march out to
exercise in the meadows, as he lay in bed. His reading was almost all in
the direction of military exploit, or romance and mediæval legend and
the later border songs of his own country. He learned Italian and read
Ariosto. Later he learned Spanish and devoured Cervantes, whose
"novelas," he said, "first inspired him with the ambition to excel in
fiction;" and all that he read and admired he remembered. Scott used to
illustrate the capricious affinity of his own memory for what suited it,
and its complete rejection of what did not, by old Beattie of
Meikledale's answer to a Scotch divine, who complimented him on the
strength of his memory. "No, sir," said the old Borderer, "I have no
command of my memory. It only retains what hits my fancy; and

probably, sir, if you were to preach to me for two hours, I would not be
able, when you finished, to remember a word you had been saying."
Such a memory, when it belongs to a man of genius, is really a sieve of
the most valuable kind. It sifts away what is foreign and alien to his
genius, and assimilates what is suited to it. In his very last days, when
he was visiting Italy for the first time, Scott delighted in Malta, for it
recalled to him Vertot's Knights of Malta, and much, other mediæval
story which he had pored over in his youth. But when his friends
descanted to him at Pozzuoli on the Thermæ--commonly called the
Temple of Serapis--among the ruins of which he stood, he only
remarked that he would believe whatever he was told, "for many of his
friends, and particularly Mr. Morritt, had frequently tried to drive
classical antiquities, as they are called, into his head, but they had
always found his skull too thick." Was it not perhaps some deep literary
instinct, like that here indicated, which made him, as a lad, refuse so
steadily to learn Greek, and try to prove to his indignant professor that
Ariosto was superior to Homer? Scott afterwards deeply regretted this
neglect of Greek; but I cannot help thinking that his regret was
misplaced. Greek literature would have brought before his mind
standards of poetry and art which could not but have both deeply
impressed and greatly daunted an intellect of so much power; I say both
impressed and daunted, because I believe that Scott himself would
never have succeeded in studies of a classical kind, while he
might--like Goethe perhaps--have been either misled, by admiration for
that school, into attempting what was not adapted to his genius, or else
disheartened in the work for which his character and ancestry really
fitted him. It has been said that there is a real affinity between Scott and
Homer. But the long and refluent music of Homer, once naturalized in
his mind, would have discontented him with that quick, sharp, metrical
tramp of his own moss-troopers, to which alone his genius as a poet
was perfectly suited.
It might be supposed that with these romantic tastes, Scott could
scarcely have made much of a lawyer, though the inference would, I
believe, be quite mistaken. His father, however, reproached him with
being better fitted for a pedlar than a lawyer,--so persistently did he
trudge over all the neighbouring counties in search of the beauties of

nature and the historic associations of battle, siege, or legend. On one
occasion when, with their last penny spent, Scott and one of his
companions had returned to Edinburgh, living during their last day on
drinks of milk offered by generous peasant-women, and the hips and
haws on the hedges, he remarked to his father how much he had wished
for George Primrose's power of playing on the