at this early period he had acquired anything which could be justly described as an English accent, he soon lost, and never again recovered, what he had thus gained from his short residence at Bath. In after life his pronunciation of words, considered separately, was seldom much different from that of a well-educated Englishman of his time; but he used many words in a sense which belonged to Scotland, not to England, and the tone and accent remained broadly Scotch, though, unless in the burr, which no doubt smacked of the country bordering on Northumberland, there was no provincial peculiarity about his utterance. He had strong powers of mimicry-could talk with a peasant quite in his own style, and frequently in general society introduced rustic patois, northern, southern, or midland, with great truth and effect; but these things were inlaid dramatically, or playfully, upon his narrative. His exquisite taste in this matter was not less remarkable in his conversation than in the prose of his Scotch novels.

Another lady, nearly connected with the Keiths of Ravelstone, has a lively recollection of young Walter, when paying a visit much about the same period to his kind relation,* the mistress of that picturesque old mansion, which furnished him in after

* Mrs Keith of Ravelstone was born a Swinton of Swinton, and sister to Sir Walter's maternal grandmother.

days with many of the features of his Tully-Veolan, and whose venerable gardens, with their massive hedges of yew and holly, he always considered as the ideal of the art. The lady, whose letter I have now before me, says she distinctly remembers the sickly boy sitting at the gate of the house with his attendant, when a poor mendicant approached, old and woe-begone, to claim the charity which none asked for in vain at Ravelstone. When the man was retiring, the servant remarked to Walter that he ought to be thankful to Providence for having placed him above the want and misery he had been contemplating. The child looked up with a half wistful, half incredulous expression, and said, "Homer was a beggar!" "How do you know that?" said the other. Why, don't you remember," answered the little Virtuoso, "that

66

'Seven Roman cities strove for Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begged his bread ?'”

The lady smiled at the "Roman cities,”—but already "Each blank in faithless memory void

The poet's glowing thought supplied."

It was in this same year, 1777, that he spent some time at Prestonpans; made his first acquaintance with George Constable, the original of his Monkbarns; explored the field where Colonel Gardiner received his death-wound, under the learned guid

ance of Dalgetty; and marked the spot "where the grass grew long and green, distinguishing it from the rest of the field,"* above the grave of poor Balmawhapple.

His uncle Thomas, whom I have described as I saw him in extreme old age at Monklaw, had the management of the farm affairs at Sandy-Knowe, when Walter returned thither from Prestonpans; he was a kindhearted man, and very fond of the child. Appearing on his return somewhat strengthened, his uncle promoted him from the Cow-bailie's shoulder to a dwarf of the Shetland race, not so large as many a Newfoundland dog. This creature walked freely into the house, and was regularly fed from the boy's hand. He soon learned to sit her well, and often alarmed aunt Jenny, by cantering over the rough places about the tower. In the evening of his life, when he had a grandchild afflicted with an infirmity akin to his own, he provided him with a little mare of the same breed, and gave her the name of Marion, in memory of this early favourite.

* Waverley, vol. ii. p. 175.

CHAPTER III.

Illustrations of the Autobiography continued-High School of Edinburgh-Residence at Kelso.

1778-1783.

But

THE report of Walter's progress in horsemanship probably reminded his father that it was time he should be learning other things beyond the department either of aunt Jenny or uncle Thomas, and after a few months he was recalled to Edinburgh. extraordinary as was the progress he had by this time made in that self-education which alone is of primary consequence to spirits of his order, he was found too deficient in lesser matters to be at once entered in the High School. Probably his mother dreaded, and deferred as long as she could, the day when he should be exposed to the rude collision of a crowd of boys. At all events he was placed first in a little private school kept by one Leechman in Bristo-Port; and

then, that experiment not answering expectation, under the domestic tutorage of Mr James French, afterwards minister of East Kilbride in Lanarkshire. This respectable man considered him fit to join Luke Fraser's class in October 1778.

His own account of his progress at this excellent seminary is, on the whole, very similar to what I have received from some of his surviving school-fellows. His quick apprehension and powerful memory enabled him, at little cost of labour, to perform the usual routine of tasks, in such a manner as to keep him generally "in a decent place" (so he once expressed it to Mr Skene) "about the middle of the class; with which,” he continued, "I was the better contented, that it chanced to be near the fire.”* Fraser was, I believe, more zealous in enforcing attention to the technicalities of grammar, than to excite curiosity about historical facts, or imagination to strain after the flights of a poet. There is no evidence that Scott, though he speaks of him as his "kind master," in remembrance probably of sympathy for his physical infirmities, ever attracted his special notice with reference to scholarship; but Adam, the

Mr

According to Mr Irving's recollections, Scott's place, after the first winter, was usually between the 7th and the 15th from the top of the class. He adds, "Dr James Buchan was always the dux; David Douglas (Lord Reston) second; and the present

Lord Melville third.