About this time Scott's father was recommended to send him to Bath, the waters of which, it was suggested, would prove beneficial to his weak limb. Accompanied, therefore, by his aunt, in his fourth year he went to London by sea, visited some of the remarkable places, which he accurately recollected, and then travelled on to Bath, where he remained about a year. This stay was of little or no advantage to his health, but must have been highly beneficial in opening up his mind. He there became acquainted with John Home, the author of "Douglas," thou" gliding from the stage," and was introduced to all the amusements, suitable to his years, which the place afforded. He was quite fascinated with the theatre, to which he was taken for the first time; and so deeply was the whole scene graven on his memory, that fifty years afterwards he described the sensations with which it inspired him, just as if it had been an affair of yesterday. He never recalled his juvenile impressions of the place without a feeling of pleasure; inferior, however, to that expressed at the recollection of being laid among the crags and rocks about his grandsire's homestead, viewing the landscape around with delighted eye, or clapping his hands, and exclaiming, "Bonny, bonny!" as the lightning flashed around him. For there it was that, while listening to his relatives' stories of an other age, his mind's eye caught the first glimpse of that past state of society, half-military, half-pastoral, of which he afterwards presented so life-like a picture; of those stalwart moss-troopers, whose word was "snaffle, spur, and spear;" and of the gallant warriors, "dreaded in battle and loved in hall," who seem to ride along his pages in glittering mail, with lofty crests and waving plumes.

From Bath he went, for a short while, to Edinburgh, where he astonished his father's visitors by his display of genius, and then returned to Sandie Knowe, to canter the pony to which he was promoted about the ruins of the tower, and feast his eyes with the ruined glories of the locality. In his eighth year he was taken for sea-bathing to the historic village of Prestonpans, which his first novel made yet more widely known, and became intimate with a military veteran of the name of Dalgetty, who was glad of so ready and eager a listener to his tales of the German wars, in which he had served. That his attention had been of the deepest kind, the future fully and satisfactorily proved. He likewise at that place formed the friendship of another ancient worthy, who first told him of Falstaff and other characters in Shakspeare, and whose peculiarities he afterwards immortalised in "The Antiquary."

With a mind full of picturesque images, and a memory stored with rich lore, Scott now returned to his father's house in Edinburgh, and after a little preparatory training in private was sent to the High School in 1779; where, according to his own ac-count, he was no apt scholar, hut "glanced like a meteor from one end of the class to the other." He soon, however, became an especial favourite with his schoolfellows, who used to assemble around and admire him, as he told countless stories, during the winter play-hours, at the fireside of a dame in the vicinity. It might have been natural for him to betake himself to severe study, owing to the lameness, which seemed to unfit him, in some measure, for the athletic sports of other boys: but with his characteristic energy, and systematic rebellion against circumstances, he set himself to win renown in the very games for which he might have been considered disqualified; and the valour and prowess of the descendant of "auld Wat," as he prided himself on being, soon became conspicuous, in the desperate street frays, in which the well-clad champions of George's Square engaged against the ragged, but brave, hardy, and, it must be added, the chivalrous urchins of the Crosscauseway.

On his class being turned over to Dr. Adam, the rector, Scott came more into notice, and received some praise. He now made several translations in verse from Virgil and Horace, which were highly thought of; and he produced some original pieces, which are short, but of considerable merit.

From the High School he should have gone direct to college; hut, his health becoming extremely delicate from rapid growth, he was again consigned to the kind care of his aunt, who had now taken up her quarters in a house close to the old abbey of Kelso, which he calls "the most beautiful, if not the most romantic, village in Scotland." It is stated, that at this time the flourishing traders of the little town assumed a superiority which was far from agreeable to the spirit of the clever and satirical maiden lady, who, on her part, did not forget that she had gentle blood in her veins, high-bred kinsmen in the district, and a sharp tongue in her head. The petty warfare, to which this naturally led, could not but be distasteful to the high spirit of the young poet; who accordingly took refuge in his long-cherished traditions. He began to look upon the ruinous castles and religious houses in the neighbourhood with new eyes. He had formerly viewed them merely with the wonder and curiosity which might have animated any hoy of extraordinary observation. He now regarded them as places in which he had a hereditary interest, alto-gether independent of the individuals to whom they happened to belong. His fancy peopled them with their ancient inhabitants; and among these he discovered friends and kinsmen, hardly less dear to his kindly heart than the companions with whom he roamed and romanced in the solitary places about

Arthur's Seat, or the relatives who had watched over his infant slumbers, placed the spirited poetry of the clan in his little hands, and imprinted the first rude images of border warfare on his opening mind. There were the fearless chiefs, who had driven the beeves of the English side, and pathetically lamented the impossibility of transporting haystacks over the Border; the stainless knights, who had tamed the sparkling crests of royal dukes, wedded the daughters of kings, and almost singlehanded faced the conquering foe on lost fields, and the "good lairds," who had borne the Douglas standard in some of the fiercest fights, in which "the bloody heart blazed in the van," and with whose dust he hoped, not in vain, that his own would mingle. Thus sprang up the ideas which grew into his matchless "Lay," and the feelings which he embalmed in "The Monastery;" and thus originated that extraordinary pride in old names, and interest in old manners, which afterwards made Mm sing, in varying cadence, of Border chivalry. Doubtless few can understand such feelings; many have not hesitated to condemn them; and people will always look upon such matters with very different eyes. But it would certainly be very difficult for those who deprecate this tendency in Scott's writings to imagine, that if such had not existed, emblazoning the past, colouring the present, and irradiating the future, they would ever have revelled free and unrestrained in those fair fields of old romance, which he has thrown open to all succeeding generations.