LITMIR.BIZ

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066226763

Table of Contents

       SIR WALTER SCOTT.

       CHAPTER I.

       ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD.

       CHAPTER II.

       YOUTH—CHOICE OF A PROFESSION.

       CHAPTER III.

       LOVE AND MARRIAGE.

       CHAPTER IV.

       EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY.

       CHAPTER V.

       SCOTT'S MATURER POEMS.

       CHAPTER VI.

       COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS.

       CHAPTER VII.

       FIRST COUNTRY HOMES.

       CHAPTER VIII.

       REMOVAL TO ABBOTSFORD, AND LIFE THERE.

       CHAPTER IX.

       SCOTT'S PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE BALLANTYNES.

       CHAPTER X.

       THE WAVERLEY NOVELS.

       CHAPTER XI.

       MORALITY AND RELIGION.

       CHAPTER XII.

       DISTRACTIONS AND AMUSEMENTS AT ABBOTSFORD.

       CHAPTER XIII.

       SCOTT AND GEORGE IV.

       CHAPTER XIV.

       SCOTT AS A POLITICIAN.

       CHAPTER XV.

       SCOTT IN ADVERSITY.

       CHAPTER XVI.

       THE LAST YEAR.

       CHAPTER XVII.

       THE END OF THE STRUGGLE.

       THE END.

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

       Table of Contents

CHAPTER I.

       Table of Contents

ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD.

       Table of Contents

      Sir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great riding, sporting, and fighting clan. Indeed, his father—a Writer to the Signet, or Edinburgh solicitor—was the first of his race to adopt a town life and a sedentary profession. Sir Walter was the lineal descendant—six generations removed—of that Walter Scott commemorated in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, who is known in Border history and legend as Auld Wat of Harden. Auld Wat's son William, captured by Sir Gideon Murray, of Elibank, during a raid of the Scotts on Sir Gideon's lands, was, as tradition says, given his choice between being hanged on Sir Gideon's private gallows, and marrying the ugliest of Sir Gideon's three ugly daughters, Meikle-mouthed Meg, reputed as carrying off the prize of ugliness among the women of four counties. Sir William was a handsome man. He took three days to consider the alternative proposed to him, but chose life with the large-mouthed lady in the end; and found her, according to the tradition which the poet, her descendant, has transmitted, an excellent wife, with a fine talent for pickling the beef which her husband stole from the herds of his foes. Meikle-mouthed Meg transmitted a distinct trace of her large mouth to all her descendants, and not least to him who was to use his "meikle" mouth to best advantage as the spokesman of his race. Rather more than half-way between Auld Wat of Harden's times—i.e., the middle of the sixteenth century—and those of Sir Walter Scott, poet and novelist, lived Sir Walter's great-grandfather, Walter Scott generally known in Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie, because he would never cut his beard after the banishment of the Stuarts, and who took arms in their cause and lost by his intrigues on their behalf almost all that he had, besides running the greatest risk of being hanged as a traitor. This was the ancestor of whom Sir Walter speaks in the introduction to the last canto of Marmion:—

      "And thus my Christmas still I hold,

       Where my great

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