Sir Walter Scott | Page 4

accordingly to bring some for their acceptance. The
stranger, a person of distinguished appearance, and richly dressed,
bowed to the lady and accepted a cup; but her husband knit his brows,
and refused very coldly to partake the refreshment. A moment
afterwards the visitor withdrew, and Mr. Scott, lifting up the
window-sash, took the cup, which he had left empty on the table, and
tossed it out upon the pavement. The lady exclaimed for her china, but
was put to silence by her husband's saying, 'I can forgive your little
curiosity, madam, but you must pay the penalty. I may admit into my
house, on a piece of business, persons wholly unworthy to be treated as
guests by my wife. Neither lip of me nor of mine comes after Mr.
Murray of Broughton's.'
"This was the unhappy man who, after attending Prince Charles Stuart
as his secretary throughout the greater part of his expedition,
condescended to redeem his own life and fortune by bearing evidence
against the noblest of his late master's adherents, when--

"Pitied by gentle hearts, Kilmarnock died, The brave, Balmerino were
on thy side."[3]
"Broughton's saucer"--i. e. the saucer belonging to the cup thus
sacrificed by Mr. Scott to his indignation against one who had
redeemed his own life and fortune by turning king's evidence against
one of Prince Charles Stuart's adherents,--was carefully preserved by
his son, and hung up in his first study, or "den," under a little print of
Prince Charlie. This anecdote brings before the mind very vividly the
character of Sir Walter's parents. The eager curiosity of the
active-minded woman, whom "the honourable Mrs. Ogilvie" had been
able to keep upright in her chair for life, but not to cure of the desire to
unravel the little mysteries of which she had a passing glimpse; the
grave formality of the husband, fretting under his wife's personal
attention to a dishonoured man, and making her pay the penalty by
dashing to pieces the cup which the king's evidence had used,--again,
the visitor himself, perfectly conscious no doubt that the Hanoverian
lawyer held him in utter scorn for his faithlessness and cowardice, and
reluctant, nevertheless, to reject the courtesy of the wife, though he
could not get anything but cold legal advice from the husband:--all
these are figures which must have acted on the youthful imagination of
the poet with singular vivacity, and shaped themselves in a hundred
changing turns of the historical kaleidoscope which was always before
his mind's eye, as he mused upon that past which he was to restore for
us with almost more than its original freshness of life. With such scenes
touching even his own home, Scott must have been constantly taught to
balance in his own mind, the more romantic, against the more sober
and rational considerations, which had so recently divided house
against house, even in the same family and clan. That the stern
Calvinistic lawyer should have retained so much of his grandfather
Beardie's respect for the adherents of the exiled house of Stuart, must in
itself have struck the boy as even more remarkable than the passionate
loyalty of the Stuarts' professed partisans, and have lent a new sanction
to the romantic drift of his mother's old traditions, and one to which
they must have been indebted for a great part of their fascination.
Walter Scott, the ninth of twelve children, of whom the first six died in

early childhood, was born in Edinburgh, on the 15th of August, 1771.
Of the six later-born children, all but one were boys, and the one sister
was a somewhat querulous invalid, whom he seems to have pitied
almost more than he loved. At the age of eighteen months the boy had a
teething-fever, ending in a life-long lameness; and this was the reason
why the child was sent to reside with his grandfather--the speculative
grandfather, who had doubled his capital by buying a racehorse instead
of sheep--at Sandy-Knowe, near the ruined tower of Smailholm,
celebrated afterwards in his ballad of _The Eve of St. John_, in the
neighbourhood of some fine crags. To these crags the housemaid sent
from Edinburgh to look after him, used to carry him up, with a design
(which she confessed to the housekeeper)--due, of course, to incipient
insanity--of murdering the child there, and burying him in the moss. Of
course the maid was dismissed. After this the child used to be sent out,
when the weather was fine, in the safer charge of the shepherd, who
would often lay him beside the sheep. Long afterwards Scott told Mr.
Skene, during an excursion with Turner, the great painter, who was
drawing his illustration of Smailholm tower for one of Scott's works,
that "the habit of lying on the turf there among the sheep and the lambs