was proud of his lineage, proud of his connection with the Border, and almost looked on Harden as his birthplace. He for many years made regularly an autumnal excursion to the tower, picturesquely situated in a deep, dark, and narrow glen, through which a mountain brook discharges its waters into the Borthwick, a tributary of the Teviot. To this tower Auld Wat had brought home his beautiful bride Mary Scott, the 'Flower of Yarrow,'-the subject of many a Border ditty, and whose gentle disposition contrasted piquantly with the rough valour and masculine virtues of her lord. It was she who, when the last bullock stolen ('conveyed,' we will it call) from the English pastures was consumed, set before the assembled guests a pair of clean spurs, as a broad hint that they must work if they expected any more to eat. Beardie, too, he delights to commemorate for his devoted Jacobitism, his learning, and his intimacy with Dr. Pitcairn; although he admits that his political zeal, and the intrigues and scrapes it led him into withal, were the ruin of his fortunes, and nearly cost him his head. From his ancestors Scott derived some of his principal peculiarities-his ardent attachment to Scotland, his lingering love for the Pretender, his sympathy with martial enterprise and spirit, and a certain hairbrained sentimental trace'

which took eccentric shapes in his predecessors, but in him became the fire of the great lyrical bard.

Beardie left three sons, and the second-Robert Scott was the grandfather of the poet. He leased from Mr. Scott of Harden, his relative and chief, the farm of Sandyknowe. This is situated about a bowshot from the remarkable tower of Smailholm-a tower which figures in the poet's Marmion and Eve of St. John. It stands, a ruin, on the top of a rock of considerable height, surrounded by an amphitheatre of rugged hills, and commanding a most varied and magnificent prospect, including Dryburgh, where Scott himself now lies, 'not dead, but sleeping;' Melrose, on which his genius shed a light more magical than even the pale moonshine in which it shows so sweetly; Mertoun, with its deep groves-the seat of the Harden family; the Broom of the Cowdenknowes;

'Bonny Teviotdale, and Cheviot mountains blue ;'

the Eildon Hills (Yielding Hills' some call them, since at every step almost of view they change their aspect, like shifting clouds; Elden Hills' others, because there of old time blazed beaconfires), with their three wizard peaks, belted by

Bowden (Thomas Aird's birthplace), Newtown, Melrose, and other haunted spots; the Merse, with the Lammermoors rising like an island in the midst, where the great novelist was to fix the scene of one of the grandest tragedies in any language; and relieved against the distant horizon, that storm of mountains which gathers around the wanderings of the Ettrick, Gala, and Yarrow. Over this landscape-where it has been said every field had its battle and every rivulet its song, we add every peak its watch-fire and every hillside its peel -Scott in boyhood often 'gazed himself away,' and would realize both the spectacle and the mood of the heroine whom he was afterwards to portray in the beautiful words:

'The lady looked in mournful mood,

Looked over hill and vale,

O'er Mertoun's wood and Tweed's fair flood,
And all down Teviotdale.'

Robert Chambers, in his interesting Illustrations of the Waverley Novels, will have it that Smailholm agrees in the leading features with Avenel Castle; and there are certainly some points of resemblance, especially in the circumstance that the tower has once been surrounded by a lake, and that there are certain remains which still point to the existence of a drawbridge and a causeway

crossing a moat. The view, however, as described by Scott in The Abbot, is not the same with that we have sought to portray above; and besides, in a note to The Monastery, Scott says: 'It were vain to search near Melrose for any such castle as is here described. But in Yetholm Loch there are the remains of a fortress called Lochside Tower, which, like the supposed Castle of Avenel, is built upon an island, and connected with the land by a causeway. It is much smaller than the Castle of Avenel is described.'

Robert Scott married a Miss Halyburton, a lady sprung from an ancient family in Berwickshire,-a family which enjoyed as portion of its patrimonial possessions a part of Dryburgh, including the ruins of the Abbey. This estate would have descended to Scott through his father, but was lost by the foolish speculations of a granduncle; and 'thus,' he says in his autobiography, 'we have nothing left of Dryburgh, although my father's maternal inheritance, but the right of stretching our bones, where mine may perhaps be laid ere any eye but my own glances over these pages,'-words written with a mixture of sadness, pride, and dignity very characteristic of the author. Robert Scott's eldest son was Walter, the poet's father. He was the first of the Scott family who ever adopted a town

life. He was born in 1729, educated as a W.S., and although not much fitted naturally, either by astuteness or by temper, for the profession, yet rose to eminence in it by dint of probity and diligence. There is an epitaph in the Howff (burying-place) of Dundee:

'Here lies a writer and an honest man :
Providence works wonders nows and than.'

Scott's father was one of these rare marvels of Divine Providence, being thoroughly honest. He was a man of somewhat distant and formal manners, but of singular kindness of heart, of sterling worth, and of deep-toned piety after the Calvinistic mode. He had a noble presence, handsome features, a sweet expression of countenance; and, as Sir Walter says, 'he looked the mourner so well,' that he was often invited to funerals, and seems to have positively enjoyed those monotonous and melancholy formalities connected with Scottish interments, for which his son has expressed in his journal such disgust, and which he has limned in his Guy Mannering with such ludicrous fidelity. Old Fairford in Redgauntlet is unquestionably a graphic though slightly coloured sketch of the elder Scott by his son. His mother was well educated, as the times then went, not at all comely