By no manner of means, Sir Walter thinks; and justly. With all his gifts, but for this aunt Janet,—for his mother,—and for Lilias Redgauntlet,—he had assuredly been only a hunting laird, and the best story-teller in the Lothians.
We scarcely ever, in our study of education, ask this most essential of all questions about a man, What patience had his mother or sister with him?
And most men are apt to forget it themselves. Pardon me for speaking of myself for a moment; (if I did not know things by my own part in them, I would not write of them at all). You know that people sometimes call me a good writer: others like to hear me speak. I seldom mis-spell or mis-pronounce a word, grossly; and can generally say what I want to say. Well, my own impression about this power, such as it may be, is that it was born with me, or gradually gained by my own study. It is only by deliberate effort that I recall the long morning hours of toil, as regular as sunrise,—toil on both sides equal,—by which, year after year, my mother forced me to learn all the Scotch paraphrases by heart, and ever so many chapters of the Bible besides, (the eighth of 1st Kings being one,—try it, good reader, in a leisure hour!) allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or misplaced; while every sentence was required to be said over and over again till she was satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect a struggle between us of about three weeks, concerning the accent of the “of” in the lines
“Shall any following spring revive
The ashes of the urn?”
I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct for rhythm (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns and their contents), on reciting it, “The ashes of the urn.” It was not, I say, till after three weeks’ labour, that my mother got the accent laid upon the ashes, to her mind. But had it taken three years, she would have done it, having once undertaken to do it. And, assuredly, had she not done it, I had been simply an avaricious picture collector, or perhaps even a more avaricious money collector, to this day; and had she done it wrongly, no after-study would ever have enabled me to read so much as a single line of verse.
It is impossible, either in history or biography, to arrange what one wants to insist upon wholly by time, or wholly by rational connection. You must observe that the visit to England, of which I am now going to speak, interrupts, with a brilliant display of pyrotechnic light, the steady burning of the stars above Scott’s childhood. From the teaching of his aunt, before he could read, I should like, for several reasons, to go on at once to the teaching of his mother, after he could read; but I must content myself, for the moment, with adding the catalogue of mamma’s library to that of aunt Jessie’s. On the window-seat of Sandy-Knowe—only to be got at the pith of by help of auntie—we had the odd volume of Josephus, Automathes, and two or three old books not named. A year later, mamma provides for us—now scholars ourselves—Pope’s Homer, Allan Ramsay’s Evergreen, and, for Sundays, Bunyan, Gesner’s Death of Abel, and Rowe’s (Mrs.) Letters from the Other World. But we have made our grand tour in the meantime, and have some new ideas of this world in our head; of which the reader must now consider.
“I was in my fourth year when my father was advised that the Bath waters might be of some advantage to my lameness. My affectionate aunt—although such a journey promised to a person of her retired habits anything but pleasure or amusement—undertook as readily to accompany me to the wells of Bladud, as if she had expected all the delight that ever the prospect of a watering-place held out to its most impatient visitants.”
And why should she not? Does it not seem somewhat strange to you, from what you know of young, or even middle-aged, aunt Jessies of the present day, that Miss Scott should look upon the journey to Bath as so severe a piece of self-denial; and that her nephew regards her doing so as a matter of course?
How old was aunt Jessie, think you? Scott’s father, the eldest of a large family, was born in 1729,—in this year, therefore, was forty-six. If we uncharitably suppose Miss Jessie the next oldest, she would be precisely of the age of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble; and one could fancy her, it seems to me, on the occasion of this unforeseen trip to the most fashionable watering-place in England, putting up her “rose-collard neglegay with green robins, and her bloo quilted petticot,” without feeling herself in the position of a martyr led to the stake. But aunt Jessie must really have been much younger than Mrs. Tabitha, and have had the advantage of her in other particulars besides spelling. She was afterwards married, and when Lockhart saw her (1820?)—forty years or so after this—had still “the softest eye and the sweetest voice.” And from the thatched mansion of the moorland, Miss Jessie feels it so irksome and solemn a duty—does she?—to go to “the squares, the circus, and the parades, which put you” (Miss Lydia Melford) “in mind of the sumptuous palaces represented in prints and pictures; and the new buildings, such as Prince’s Row, Harlequin’s Row, Bladud’s Row, and twenty other rows besides,”—not to speak of a real pump in a pump-room, with a handle to it, and other machinery, instead of the unpumped Tweed!