But before I press any of his opinions—or I ought rather to say, knowledges—upon you, I must try to give you some idea of his own temper and life. His temper, I say; the mixture of clay, and the fineness of it, out of which the Potter made him; and of his life, what the power of the Third Fors had been upon it, before his own hands could make or mar his fortune, at the turn of tide. I shall do this merely by abstracting and collating (with comment) some passages out of Lockhart’s life of him; and adding any elucidatory pieces which Lockhart refers to, or which I can find myself, in his own works, so that you may be able to read them easily together. And observe, I am not writing, or attempting to write, another life of Scott; but only putting together bits of Lockhart’s life in the order which my side-notes on the pages indicate for my own reading; and I shall use Lockhart’s words, or my own, indifferently, and without the plague of inverted commas. Therefore, if anything is wrong in my statement, Lockhart is not answerable for it; but my own work in the business will nevertheless be little more than what the French call putting dots on the i’s, and adding such notes as may be needful for our present thought.
Sir Walter was born on the 15th August, 1771, in a house belonging to his father, at the head of the College Wynd, Edinburgh. The house was pulled down to make room for the northern front of the New College; and the wise people of Edinburgh then built, for I don’t know how many thousand pounds, a small vulgar Gothic steeple on the ground, and called it the “Scott Monument.” There seems, however, to have been more reason than usual for the destruction of the College Wynd, for Scott was the first survivor of seven children born in it to his father, and appears to have been saved only by the removal to the house in George’s Square,[2] which his father always afterwards occupied; and by being also sent soon afterwards into the open country. He was of purest Border race—seventh in descent from Wat of Harden and the Flower of Yarrow. Here are his six ancestors, from the sixteenth century, in order:—
- 1. Walter Scott (Auld Wat) of Harden.
- 2. Sir William Scott of Harden.
- 3. Walter Scott of Raeburn.
- 4. Walter Scott, Tutor of Raeburn.
- 5. Robert Scott of Sandy-Knowe.
- 6. Walter Scott, citizen of Edinburgh.
I will note briefly what is important respecting each of these.
I. Wat of Harden. Harden means ‘the ravine of hares.’ It is a glen down which a little brook flows to join the river Borthwick, itself a tributary of the Teviot, six miles west of Hawick, and just opposite Branxholm. So long as Sir Walter retained his vigorous habits, he made a yearly pilgrimage to it, with whatever friend happened to be his guest at the time.[3]
Wat’s wife, Mary, the Flower of Yarrow, is said to have chiefly owed her celebrity to the love of an English captive,—a beautiful child whom she had rescued from the tender mercies[4] of Wat’s moss-troopers, on their return from a Cumberland foray. The youth grew up under her protection, and is believed to have written both the words and music of many of the best songs of the Border.[5]
This story is evidently the germ of that of the ‘Lay of the last Minstrel,’ only the captivity is there of a Scottish boy to the English. The lines describing Wat of Harden are in the 4th canto,—
“Marauding chief; his sole delight
The moonlight raid, the morning fight.
Not even the Flower of Yarrow’s charms,