Historic Boyhoods

by Rupert Sargent Holland

"Pretty much like the ravens," said the boy. "I only wished I had been as good a player on the flute as poor George Primrose in 'The Vicar of Wakefield.' If I had his art, I should like nothing better than to tramp like him from cottage to cottage over the world."

"I doubt," said the father, "I greatly doubt, sir, you were born for nae better than a scapegoat."

It may be that as a result of these chance expeditions Walter's father finally came to realize that the boy might be made use of in certain legal business that required sending messengers into the Highlands. Soon he was sent with some legal papers to the Maclarens, who lived in that beautiful lake country about Loch Lomond which Scott was later to make famous in "The Lady of the Lake." It was the first time he had been in that country, and the changing panorama unrolled before his eyes like a land of dreams.

It happened that Walter was traveling in the company of a sergeant and six men from a Highland regiment stationed in Sterling, and so he journeyed quite like some ancient chieftain, with a front and rear guard, and bearing arms. The sergeant was a thorough Highlander, full of stories of Rob Roy and of his own early adventures, and an excellent companion. The trip was a great success, and fired Walter's desires to see more of a country which even then was only half-civilized.

A little later he had another chance, being sent north to visit another of his father's clients, an old Jacobite who had fought in the uprisings of 1715 and 1745. Paul Jones was then threatening a descent on the Scotch coast, and Walter had the satisfaction of seeing the old Jacobite chief making ready to bear arms again, and heard him exult at the prospect of drawing claymore once more before he died. The boy was so delighted at the stories the old man told that the latter invited him to visit him that fall, and so he spent his holiday with him.

Riding northward on this visit the vale of Perth first burst on his view. Long afterward he described the tremendous impression this sight made upon him. "I recollect pulling up the reins," he wrote later, "without meaning to do so, and gazing on the scene before me as if I had been afraid it would shift, like those in a theatre, before I could distinctly observe its different parts, or convince myself that what I saw was real."

Even as he remembered so vividly the tales the old men and women had told him when he was a very little boy, the stories of his grandmother, of border warfare, of heroes of Scotland, such as Watt of Harden, and Wight Willie of Aikwood, merrymen much like Robin Hood and Little John, and as he remembered the romances he and his friend had read in the hills, so he was now treasuring up wild bits of scenery with all the ardor of a poet or a painter. He was growing to know Scotland as no other man had ever known it.

The boy Walter had little knowledge then of the great use to which he was later to put his love of Scottish history; he expected to be a lawyer and was studying to that end, but all his spare moments were spent in hunting legends of his land. He became eager to visit the then wild and inaccessible region of Liddesdale, so that he might see the ruins of the famous castle of the Hermitage, and try to pick up some of the ancient "riding ballads" as they were called, songs which were said to be still preserved among the descendants of the old moss-troopers, who had followed the banners of the House of Douglass, when they were lords of that remote castle.

He found a man who knew that rugged country well, and for seven successive years Walter Scott made a "raid," as he called it, into that country, following each stream to its source, and studying every ruined tower or castle from foundation stone to topmost battlement.

There were no inns in the whole district. The explorers had to stop over night at any chance shepherd's hut or farmer's cottage, but everywhere they met with open welcome, and from each home they gathered songs and stories, and sometimes relics of border wars to take back with them to Edinburgh. Even then the youth had little notion of what he should do with all the facts he was gathering. The friend he traveled with said later, "Walter was makin' himself a' the time, but he didna ken maybe what he was about till years had passed. At first he thought o' little, I dare say, but the queerness and the fun."