The home of his boyhood and youth, 25 George Square, still stands, looking exactly the same to-day as it did then. Here the little lame boy lived, and regretted the country life at Sandyknowe among dogs and sheep and legends; and the troubles of life began for him as he limped backwards and forwards to the High School, or sensitively shrank from the rough tyranny of his elder brother; and the triumphs of life fired him as he took his share in the street “bickers” between the High School boys and the rough lads of Potterrow, or as he gained fame in the High School yard as a story-teller. It was under his parents’ roof in George Square that Scott lived all the years from those schoolboy days till he was a young man of many friendships, and slovenly dress and deep feelings and enthusiasms, studying law in deference to his father’s wishes, but thinking his own long thoughts during his rambles over Blackford Hill and the country round Edinburgh; and at home, in his father’s house, giving full play to his fancies in the safety of his own small den in the sunk basement, where he was surrounded by “more books than shelves,” where he hoarded collections of Scottish and Roman coins, and where he had proudly crossed a claymore and a Lochaber axe over a little print of Prince Charlie. But perhaps the fondest
To the left of the picture, over a roof in the foreground, appears part of the tunnel of the North British Railway, above which rises that fine classic building, the (modern) High School. It stands on the southern slope of the Calton Hill, a portion of which is seen to the extreme left. On the extreme right is the monument to Robert Burns.
treasure in that den was a certain china saucer which,—possibly unknown to the father upstairs,—the young Cavalier kept hung on the wall, and whose tale he no doubt often unfolded to his friends. Once upon a time Mrs. Scott’s curiosity had been roused by the visits, night after night, of a mysterious stranger, who came in a sedan-chair and a cloak, and remained closeted with her husband in his business-room till long after the household had retired. Mr. Scott preserved a stern reticence; but woman’s wit found out a way. One night, very late, when the house was silent in sleep, Mrs. Scott entered the business-room with a smile and two cups of tea, and the hospitable suggestion that, as they had sat so long, they might be glad of some refreshment. The stranger proved to be a richly dressed man, who bowed, took one of the cups, and drank it. But Mr. Scott, turning aside, neither drank his tea nor introduced his guest. Presently, returning from showing the stranger out, he took the empty cup, and, throwing up the window-sash, flung it out into the night, with the now famous words, “Neither lip of me nor mine comes after Murray of Broughton’s.”[58]
It was here, in this small den on the sunk floor of 25 George Square, that Jeffrey found Scott when he called on him the evening after he had asked to be introduced to him at the Speculative Society, where young Scott had read a paper on “Ballads”: and Jeffrey evidently did not extend his approval of Scott and of the paper on Ballads to this sunk den,—or was it that Scott had no command of hospitalities in his father’s house?—for they sallied forth together and supped at a tavern. No doubt, before they went, Jeffrey had looked round curiously at the treasures of his new acquaintance, and had been told how the “Broughton saucer” had come by its widowed condition.
It was decided that Scott should become an advocate, and he and his friend Clerk—a friendship made in the High School days, to last through life—read for the Bar together. Poor Scott, with his open-air nature and his dreamy enthusiasms, how he hated the drudgery! But he buckled to it; and every summer morning for two summers he used to walk from George Square to the house of his friend Clerk, “at the extremity of Princes Street, New Town,” arriving at seven o’clock, to rouse his sleepy fellow-student to an examination of Heineccius’s Analysis of the Institutes and Pandects and Erskine’s Institutes of the Law of Scotland. It speaks well for Clerk that their friendship did last.