Sir Walter Scott | Page 2

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 grandsire came of
old, With amber beard and flaxen hair, And reverend apostolic air,--
The feast and holy tide to share, And mix sobriety with wine, And
honest mirth with thoughts divine; Small thought was his in after time
E'er to be hitch'd into a rhyme, The simple sire could only boast That
he was loyal to his cost; The banish'd race of kings revered, And lost
his land--but kept his beard."
Sir Walter inherited from Beardie that sentimental Stuart bias which his
better judgment condemned, but which seemed to be rather part of his
blood than of his mind. And most useful to him this sentiment
undoubtedly was in helping him to restore the mould and fashion of the
past. Beardie's second son was Sir Walter's grandfather, and to him he
owed not only his first childish experience of the delights of country
life, but also,--in his own estimation at least,--that risky, speculative,
and sanguine spirit which had so much influence over his fortunes. The
good man of Sandy-Knowe, wishing to breed sheep, and being destitute
of capital, borrowed 30l. from a shepherd who was willing to invest
that sum for him in sheep; and the two set off to purchase a flock near
Wooler, in Northumberland; but when the shepherd had found what he
thought would suit their purpose, he returned to find his master
galloping about a fine hunter, on which he had spent the whole capital
in hand. This speculation, however, prospered. A few days later Robert
Scott displayed the qualities of the hunter to such admirable effect with
John Scott of Harden's hounds, that he sold the horse for double the
money he had given, and, unlike his grandson, abandoned speculative
purchases there and then. In the latter days of his clouded fortunes,
after Ballantyne's and Constable's failure, Sir Walter was accustomed to
point to the picture of his grandfather and say, "Blood will out: my
building and planting was but his buying the hunter before he stocked
his sheep-walk, over again." But Sir Walter added, says Mr. Lockhart,
as he glanced at the likeness of his own staid and prudent father, "Yet it
was a wonder, too, for I have a thread of the attorney in me," which

was doubtless the case; nor was that thread the least of his inheritances,
for from his father certainly Sir Walter derived that disposition towards
conscientious, plodding industry, legalism of mind, methodical habits
of work, and a generous, equitable interpretation of the scope of all his
obligations to others, which, prized and cultivated by him as they were,
turned a great genius, which, especially considering the hare-brained
element in him, might easily have been frittered away or devoted to
worthless ends, to such fruitful account, and stamped it with so grand
an impress of personal magnanimity and fortitude. Sir Walter's father
reminds one in not a few of the formal and rather martinetish traits
which are related of him, of the father of Goethe, "a formal man, with
strong ideas of strait-laced education, passionately orderly (he thought
a good book nothing without a good binding), and never so much
excited as by a necessary deviation from the 'pre-established harmony'
of household rules." That description would apply almost wholly to the
sketch of old Mr. Scott which the novelist has given us under the thin
disguise of Alexander Fairford, Writer to the Signet, in Redgauntlet, a
figure confessedly meant, in its chief features, to represent his father.
To this Sir Walter adds, in one of his later journals, the trait that his
father was a man of fine presence, who conducted all conventional
arrangements with a certain grandeur and dignity of air, and "absolutely
loved a funeral." "He seemed to preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of
cousins merely for the pleasure of being at their funerals, which he was
often asked to superintend, and I suspect had sometimes to pay for. He
carried me with him as often as