6. Twelve years old to fifteen. College life, broken by illness, his uncle Robert taking good care of him at Rosebank, 1783–1786.
7. Fifteen to twenty-five. Apprenticeship to his father, and law practice entered on. Study of human life, and of various literature in Edinburgh. His first fee of any importance expended on a silver taper-stand for his mother. 1786–1796.
You have thus ‘seven ages’ of his youth to examine, one by one; and this convenient number really comes out without the least forcing; for the virtual, though not formal, apprenticeship to his father—happiest of states for a good son—continues through all the time of his legal practice. I only feel a little compunction at crowding the Prestonpans time together with the second Sandy-Knowe time; but the former is too short to be made a period, though of infinite importance to Scott’s life. Hear how he writes of it,[6] revisiting the place fifty years afterwards:—
“I knew the house of Mr. Warroch, where we lived,” (see where the name of the Point of Warroch in ‘Guy Mannering’ comes from!) “I recollected my juvenile ideas of dignity attendant on the large gate, a black arch which lets out upon the sea. I saw the Links where I arranged my shells upon the turf, and swam my little skiff in the pools. Many recollections of my kind aunt—of old George Constable—of Dalgetty” (you know that name also, don’t you?), “a virtuous half-pay lieutenant, who swaggered his solitary walk on the parade, as he called a little open space before the same port.” (Before the black arch, Scott means, not the harbour.) And he falls in love also there, first—“as children love.”
And now we can begin to count the rosary of his youth, bead by bead.
1st period—From birth to three years old.
I have hitherto said nothing to you of his father or mother, nor shall I yet, except to bid you observe that they had been thirteen years married when Scott was born; and that his mother was the daughter of a physician, Dr. Rutherford, who had been educated under Boerhaave. This fact might be carelessly passed by you in reading Lockhart; but if you will take the pains to look through Johnson’s life of Boerhaave, you will see how perfectly pure and beautiful and strong every influence was, which, from whatever distance, touched the early life of Scott. I quote a sentence or two from Johnson’s closing account of Dr. Rutherford’s master:—
“There was in his air and motion something rough and artless, but so majestic and great at the same time, that no man ever looked upon him without veneration, and a kind of tacit submission to the superiority of his genius. The vigour and activity of his mind sparkled visibly in his eyes, nor was it ever observed that any change of his fortune, or alteration in his affairs, whether happy or unfortunate, affected his countenance.
“His greatest pleasure was to retire to his house in the country, where he had a garden stored with all the herbs and trees which the climate would bear; here he used to enjoy his hours unmolested, and prosecute his studies without interruption.”[7]
The school of medicine in Edinburgh owed its rise to this man, and it was by his pupil Dr. Rutherford’s advice, as we saw, that the infant Walter’s life was saved. His mother could not nurse him, and his first nurse had consumption. To this, and the close air of the wynd, must be attributed the strength of the childish fever which took away the use of the right limb when he was eighteen months old. How many of your own children die, think you, or are wasted with sickness, from the same causes, in our increasing cities? Scott’s lameness, however, we shall find, was, in the end, like every other condition of his appointed existence, helpful to him.