T may be safely asserted that no writer ever exercised a more immediate and beneficial influence on the welfare of his countrymen than did Sir Walter Scott. If ever any wielder of the pen, prose writer or poet, deserved a great national tribute, it was he who brought into sympathetic union two peoples living apart in one small country; who stirred into an ardent and not impermanent flame a somewhat dispirited national pride; who brought wealth practically beyond calculation to a land formerly one of the poorest in Europe; who made Scotland the goal of thousands from all parts of the globe, as, indeed, it remains to this day; and who bequeathed to the whole civilised world a noble legacy of great works. He was essentially a representative man. Many will call to mind Carlyle's estimate of him-"No Scotchman of his time was more entirely Scotch than Walter Scott;

the good and the not so good, which all Scotchmen inherit, ran through every fibre of him ;" and certainly, if ever a nation found expression in one man it was in the case of Scotland and Scott. There has been nothing to compare herewith in the past, and, as is plainly manifest, it is altogether improbable that there will be such another instance in the future.

The

To realise the true greatness of the subject of this memoir, it is necessary to have at least some superficial knowledge of Scotland as it was at the close of the eighteenth century. Small country as it is, it was then more of a terra incognita to southerners, and so far as the Highlands were concerned, to the Lowland Scotch themselves, than nowadays is Australia or New Zealand. Highlands constituted, to all intents and purposes, a separate state, in many respects a hostile one; for though the days of Roderick Dhu were over, there still lingered among the Lowland peasantry a deep suspicion and dislike, mingled with angry contempt, of their Celtic neighbours. We are told that there is no such race extant as the pure Celtic; but howsoever this may be, we are accustomed to regard as Celts the Gaelic-speaking populations of Ireland and Scotland; and it was this Celtic survival that was steadily dwindling away when the genius of one man arrested its retrogression as with the wave of a magic wand. Then came the Peninsular campaign, where the clansmen charged on the battlefields side by side with the men of Clydes

dale and the Lothians, until a time came when an Armstrong or Elliott, a Morton or Maxwell, called themselves in common with the Camerons, Macleods, and Macdonalds, simply Scotchmen, instead of Borderers or Gaels.

It is just about a century since Scott, while an apprentice-at-law in Edinburgh, having to go on a legal errand into the Highlands in connection with some non-rent-paying Maclarens, was accompanied, as a matter of course, by an escort of a sergeant and six soldiers. That the escort proved quite unnecessary is not to the point; the fact of its having been considered advisable being quite eloquent enough a commentary on the civilisation of the then vaguely known districts lying west and north of that famous pass in the Trosachs, out of which there was not so long before Scott's time but one way of issuenamely, by a rude ladder adown a precipitous slope, a ladder compact of branches and roots of trees. Even more surprising it is to learn that when the future poet and novelist drove in a small gig through Liddesdale, in the southland, his progress attracted much wondering attention, for never before had the peasantry of this lonely district beheld any wheeled vehicle pass along their rough moorland paths and stony braes. Bearing this in mind, it is easier to realise that the famous old Border-reiver, Auld Wat o' Harden, was a not very remote ancestor of Scott-the same who had for wife the famous Mary, the "Flower of Yarrow," who one day, finding the supply of victuals running

short, placed before her hungry husband and his guests a great dish, on removing the cover of which they saw only a pair of heavy spurs—an admirable hint as to the urgency of the household needs, and the way to supply them. The great-grandson of "Auld Wat" was that Scott of Harden popularly called "Beardie," from the long beard he wore in memory of the execution of Charles I., and this Beardie it was who was great-grandfather to the poet.

Nor was Scott's marvellous influence slow in exercising itself. The Lady of the Lake was published in May, and in July of the same summer a tide of visitors from Edinburgh and elsewhere set towards the Loch Katrine district, to the mingled bewilderment and delight of the Trosachs Highlanders. From that summer onward this annual tide has never ceased, has gained enormously in volume, and now spreads throughout Scotland from Edinburgh on the east to the Western Isles— from the rippling shallows of the Tweed to the wilds of Ross and Sutherland, and even to the distant Orkneys. Within his lifetime, as we have already seen, the man who has fittingly been styled the Wizard of the North saw justice done to the Celtic race, of which he was so ardent a champion, without being able to claim kinship therewith; saw ancient jealousies and misunderstandings pass away, and beheld the solidification of Gael and Lowlander in one Scottish people; witnessed a widespread revival and a still more widespread new

awakening of interest in the romantic history of his native land, an unprecedented access of national material prosperity, and the establishment on a sure basis of great hopes for the future. All this he witnessed; and though, in the sincere humility that was so characteristic of his nature, he would have deprecated the assertion, he must have realised that if these great results were not wholly due to his influence, he at any rate had been the main instrument in their evolution.

While, therefore, the civilised world finds in Walter Scott a writer of supreme imaginative power, a poet of Homeric force, simplicity, and picturesqueness, his countrymen recognise in him the man who, in addition to the great legacy of literature which he bequeathed primarily to them, wrought more good to his native land than has done any other of her sons since Wallace fought for and Bruce maintained her independence.

I.

It is not frequent for the lives of poets and imaginative writers to be strongly permeated by that air of romance wherein they so delight to dwell in the spirit. Little differing, essentially, from the lives of ordinary men are those of Chaucer or of Shakespeare, of Milton or of Wordsworth. Now and again we meet with a few about whose days broods this subtle air, as in the case of a Tasso ending a brilliant career in the thraldom of