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Master Barnardine, Claudio, Shallow, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Falconbridge, seem all old acquaintances of the poet.

In 1778, Scott, having first got a few lessons from one Leechman and one French, was sent to the High School, under the charge of Luke Frazer, whom he describes as a worthy man and a capital scholar. Thence he passed to the rector's class, taught by the celebrated Dr. Adam. This remarkable person had not a little of his namesake Parson Adams, in Fielding, about him. He was a simpleminded, sincere, absent individual, as well as a profound scholar; just the kind of man, like the parson when regretting that he had lost his calfskin Eschylus, to condole himself with the reflection, that as it was dark, it was impossible for him to have seen to read it. It was another kind of night which was descending on Alexander Adam. when he uttered his memorable last saying, 'It is getting dark; you may go home, boys.' His life, otherwise a useful, laborious, and happy one, was embittered first of all by the rude usage he met with from William Nicol, Burns' clever but coarseminded associate, who was an under-teacher in the school, and who even on one occasion waylaid and assaulted the rector; and secondly, by the obloquy to which his republican principles, which he avowed

on all occasions, and taught in his school, exposed him. His works, Roman Antiquities, Grammar of Ancient Geography, etc., show vast and very exact learning, and were once popular schoolbooks. Adam is said to have appreciated Scott's amazing memory, and frequently called him up to answer questions about dates; and although neither he nor the other teachers had any suspicion of his genius, he pronounced him better acquainted than any of his contemporaries with the meaning, if not with the words, of the classical authors. He encouraged him also to make translations from Homer and Virgil. One or two trifling pieces of verse by him of this date have been discovered. But on the whole, although not a dunce, Scott was, as he says, an incorrigibly idle imp,' constantly glancing like a meteor from the bottom to the top of the form, and vice versa, and shone more in the yards-the High School playgrounds-than in the class. Notwithstanding his infirmity, he was the bravest of football players, the swiftest of racers, the strongest of pugilists, the most persevering in snowball bickers, the most daring climber of the kittle nine steps (a pass of peril leading along the dark brow of the Castle rock), and the most dexterous and strategic commander in the mimic battles fought in the Crosscauseway between the children of the mob

and those of the better citizens. Many poets, such as Cowper and Shelley, have been overborne and become broken-hearted amidst the rough play of a public school. But the Scott, the Byron, and the Wilson, find it their element; and their early superiority in sports and pastimes is an augury of their future greatness, and a prelibation of the manhood of their character and the all-sidedness of their genius.

Previous to this, a lady in all points qualified to appreciate genius, the accomplished Mrs. Cockburn, the authoress of the modern version of The Flowers o' the Forest, had met Scott in his father's house in George Square, and thus describes him: 'I last night supped in Mr. Walter Scott's. He has the most extraordinary genius of a boy I ever saw. He was reading a poem to his mother when I went in. I made him read on: it was the description of a shipwreck. His passion rose with the storm. He lifted up his eyes and hands. "There's the mast gone," says he; "crash it goes: they will all perish!" After his agitation he turns to me: "This is too melancholy," says he, "I must read you something more amusing." When taken to bed last night, he told his aunt that he liked that lady. "What lady?" says she. "Why, Mrs. Cockburn; for I think she is a virtuoso, like myself."'

B

From Adam's tuition Scott would have instantly gone to College, had it not been that his health became delicate, and his father was induced to send him to Kelso. There, being once more under the kind care of his Aunt Janet, he added to the stores of his reading, which in Edinburgh had been very miscellaneous. He became acquainted with Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry, which he read under the shade of a splendid Platanus, or Oriental Plane, a huge hill of leaves in his aunt's garden; while attending the school of one Lancelot he increased considerably his stock of classical lore; and he made the acquaintance of James Ballantyne, a man whose fortunes were afterwards so closely linked with his own, who seemed born to be his amanuensis and literary factotum, and in whose company, now in the school, and now when wandering along the banks of the Tweed, he began to exercise his unrivalled gift of telling stories. At Kelso, too, a spot distinguished by its combination of beauties, the Tweed and Teviot beside it melting in music into each other's arms, and with noble mansions and ancient abbeys in the background, his eyes were more fully opened to the beauties of that Scottish nature of which he became the most ideal, yet minute, the most lingering and loving depictor.

CHAPTER II.

AT COLLEGE, AND MAKING HIMSELF.

HEN Byron felt that he had ceased to be a boy, it gave him, we are told, a pang of the most exquisite anguish. What Scott's feelings at this era were we are not particularly informed; but we suspect that it was with a deep sigh that he, too (in 1784), left the shade of his Platanus for that of his Alma Mater, and exchanged the delightful pages of Percy for the reading of the Latin and Greek classics under Professors Hill and Dalziel. In Latin he became a fair proficient; Greek he hated so intensely, that he was called by his fellow-students the 'Greek Blockhead.' Glorying in his shame, he wrote an essay, filled with all kinds of useless learning, in which he preferred Ariosto to Homer, and threw ignorant contempt on the fine old language of the latter. Had Sir Daniel Sandford been his professor,

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