Scott's life was no patchwork but woven on a single loom. He did not turn suddenly in manhood to discover the colour of his life. It had been his in babyhood. An old clergyman, a friend of his aunt, protested that 'one may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is,' while Walter Scott, aged three or four, shouted the ballad of Hardyknute:—
'And he has ridden o'er muir and moss,
O'er hills and mony a glen,
When he came to a wounded knight
Making a heavy mane.
Here maun I lye, here maun I dye,
By treacherie's false guiles;
Witless I was that e'er gave faith
To wicked woman's smiles.'
As he grew older, he was able, like Froissart, to 'inquire of the truth of the deeds of war and adventures' that were to be the background of much of his work. He knew old Lowland gentlemen who had paid blackmail to Rob Roy, was told of the '15 and the '45 by veterans who had used their swords on those occasions, and heard of the executions after Culloden from one who had seen at Carlisle the rebels' heads above the Scottish Gate. The warlike knowledge of his childhood was ripened and mellowed for story-telling by the enthusiasms of his youth. Riding through the Lowland valleys collecting the border minstrelsy, his good nature and pleasant way let him learn in a broad acquaintanceship fashion the character of his countrymen. He had not Balzac's deep-cutting analytic knowledge of men, but knew them as a warm-hearted fellow of themselves. He knew them as one man knows another, and not with the passionately speculative knowledge belonging to a mind that contemplates them from another world. He did not analyse them, but wrote of their doings with an unconscious externality that very much simplified their motives and made them fit participators in the sportsman-like life of his books.