Walter Scott of Reformation times, whose namesake and descendant would make its name known so widely. At Sandyknowe farm, between the Eden and the Leader Water, he lived as a sickly child in his grandparents’ charge, and under the massive ruin of Smailholm Tower, drank in with reviving health the inspiration of Border lore and romance—
Ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lover’s sleights, of ladies’ charms,
Of witches’ spells, of warriors’ arms;
Of patriot battles, won of old
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold;
Of later fields of feud and fight,
When, pouring from their Highland height,
The Scottish clans, in headlong sway,
Had swept the scarlet ranks away.
While stretch’d at length upon the floor,
Again I fought each combat o’er,
Pebbles and shells, in order laid,
The mimic ranks of war display’d;
And onward still the Scottish Lion bore,
And still the scatter’d Southron fled before.
Later on, the old folks being dead, his sanatorium quarters were shifted to his aunt’s home at Kelso, where also an uncle bought a house, inherited by the lucky poet. For a time he attended the Grammar School, whose pupils had for playground the adjacent ruins of the Abbey, so roughly handled in Border wars and by iconoclastic zealots. This boy had other resources than play, who could forget his dinner in the charms of Percy’s Reliques; and his lameness did not hinder him from roaming over the beautiful country in which Tweed and Teviot meet. Their confluence encloses the ruins of Roxburgh Castle, once a favourite royal residence and strong Border fortress, before whose walls James II., trying to wrest it back from the English, was killed by the bursting of one of those new-fangled “engines” that were to break down moated castles, replaced by such sumptuous mansions as Floors, the modern château of the Duke of Roxburghe. Roxburgh town has disappeared more completely than its castle, its name surviving in that of the picturesque Border shire where, off and on, Scott spent much of his youth, photographing on a sensitive mind the scenes he has made famous, and getting to know the flesh-and-blood models of Meg Merrilies, Edie Ochiltree, Old Mortality, Dandie Dinmont, Josiah Cargill, and other “characters” that but for him might now be forgotten.
Kelso stands almost on the site of Roxburgh, but its place as county town is taken by Jedburgh, guard of the “Middle March,” farther to the south, yet not so near the crooked border line. It stands upon a tributary of the Teviot, among “Eden scenes of crystal Jed,” flowing down from the Cheviots. Tourists do not know what they miss by grudging time to divagate on the branches connecting the two main lines of the North British Railway. Jedburgh, birthplace of scientific celebrities, Sir David Brewster and Mrs. Somerville, has another grand Abbey, that suffered much from early English tourists; and its jail occupies the site of a vanished royal castle. In this old seat of “Jeddart justice,” Scott began his career at the Bar, by the defence of such a poacher and sheep-stealer as his own forebears had been on a bolder scale. Here a few years later, he met Wordsworth in the house recently marked by a memorial tablet; and other dwellings are pointed out as having housed Queen Mary and Prince Charlie, while Burns has left a warm record of his visit, so many of Scotland’s idols has Jedburgh known, and may well reproach the hasty travellers who pass it by.
The young advocate did not waste much of his genius on defending sheep-stealers and the like; but in those halcyon days of patronage, through the influence of his chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, he soon got the snug berth of Sheriff of Selkirk. This brought him to live at Ashestiel on the Tweed, where he spent his happiest days, writing his best poems, and beginning Waverley, to be laid by and forgotten for years. Selkirk, too, has the misfortune of lying off the main line; but strangers would do well to turn aside here for the wild pastoral scenes of St. Mary’s Loch and the “Dowie Dens of Yarrow.” Too many, like Wordsworth, put off this trip to rheumatic years; yet it may be easily done by the coach routes from Selkirk and from Moffat on the Caledonian line, that meet at Tibbie Shiels’ Inn, whose visitors’ book enshrines such a collection of autographs; and its homely fame scorns the pretensions of the new “hotel.” This is the heart of Ettrick Forest, where stands a monument of its shepherd, James Hogg, unfairly caricatured as the genial buffoon of the Noctes, but second only to Burns as a popular poet, and best known over the English-speaking world by his “Bird of the wilderness, blithesome and cumberless.” All the schooling he had was a few months in early childhood; he taught himself to write on slate stones of the hillside where he herded cows, and this art he had to relearn when he first tried to sing of green Ettrick—
In many a rustic lay,
Her heroes, hills, and verdant groves;
Her wilds and valleys fresh and gay,
Her shepherds’ and her maidens’ loves.