stretched on the turf, his hands grasped the rough crags, and wallflower scents reached him from crumbling ruins, and streams ran sparkling before his eyes; and these realities mingled with the no less vivid ones which he had just brought with him from society.

Nor were these the only vicissitudes he knew. His tastes thus formed, suited little with his school pursuits; and hence arose wholesome and strengthening exercises of fear and love. It seems strange, contemplating Walter Scott in his after life, as firm as mild, to think that he could either experience or cause fear; but there is no doubt whatever that this formed part of the discipline of his genius. He was a naughty schoolboy, as far as learning lessons went. He tells us of disgraces and punishments for being idle himself and keeping others idle,—and of the applause of his schoolfellows for his tale-telling being a sort of recompense for what he thus underwent. Since he felt this applause a recompense, the evil of punishment was feared and felt. Since he continued to incur punishment, his love of nature and romance was yet stronger than his fear. This alternation went on for years, for he never gained credit as a learner of languages, and finished in possession of "little Latin and less Greek." For a long continuance then, there was disgrace in school, and honour in the playground; fear in school, and a passion of love among the green hills; slavery between four walls, and rapturous liberty when rambling with a romancing companion amidst the wildest scenery that lay within reach. A glorious discipline this for a sensibility which could sustain and grow under it!

Half the work was now done. Through the exercise of the sensibility the faculties were strengthened. There was yet little knowledge, but there was power,-power which would soon have preyed upon itself, if objects had not, by a new set of circumstances, been presented for it to employ itself upon. An illness confined him long to his bed, in a state which admitted of no other amusements than chess and reading. He read ravenously, and, as he himself says, idly; that is, he devoured all the poems and novels which a large circulating library afforded, till he was satiated, and then took to memoirs, travels, and history. He continued this practice of desultory reading, when afterwards removed once more into the country on account of the state of his health; and thus was he initiated into the second of the three great departments of knowledge, which it was necessary to traverse in preparation for the work of his later years. He had now made acquaintance with nature in her aspects, though not in her constitution, and with man as he is displayed in books. History showed him man in his social capacity; tales of real and fictitious adventure showed him man in contest with natural difficulties, and passing through the diversified scenery of various climates and nations; memoirs showed him man going through the experience of human existence, but all this was at second-hand. The third great study which remained was, man as he appears in actual life. It remained to verify what man seems in books by what he is before the eyes. And for this also opportunity was afforded by another change of circumstance. Walter Scott recovered his health, or rather became, for the first time, vigorous in body, and able to enter the world on the same terms with others. He studied law in college as well as under his father, and mixed in society far more than ever before; and though looked upon rather as an abstracted young man, very fond of reading, than as a particularly sociable personage, he was actually at this time, and for some years afterwards, making acquaintance with human nature under a great

variety of forms, whether in the courts, or in his own rank of society, or wandering, as was still his wont, among the vales of Tweeddale, gathering legends from the shepherds, or domesticating himself by the farmer's fireside. During this stage of his preparation, it was an important circumstance that he became enrolled in a cavalry regiment, formed under the apprehension of an invasion from France. Here he was far from being considered " an abstracted young man ;" being highly popular, from his good humour and his extraordinary powers of entertainment, which probably were exercised in a somewhat different way from the goblin romancing, which made him a favourite among his school-fellows. He now probably communicated the results of his observation of actual life, while he no doubt improved them at the same time.

During the next few years he continued to enlarge his knowledge in him all these three departments, by travelling, by the study of German literature, and by the performance of the active duties imposed upon by his office of Sheriff of Selkirkshire; an office which, no less than his travels, brought him into communication with human nature under a variety of modifications. The study of German literature alone,— (we say nothing of the language, as, by Sir Walter's own confession, he only used it as a means of scrambling into the literature)—this new acquisition alone might serve, to a mind so prepared as his, as a sufficient stimulus to the work he afterwards achieved; and to it we cannot but attribute much of that richness of moral conception, much of the transparent depth of his philosophy of character, which is, to merely English readers, the most astonishing of his excellencies.

Here, then, we have gained some faint insight into the process by which an organization (probably of great original excellence) was made the most of, and rendered the constituent of a genius as kindly as it was Such an organizapowerful; that is to say, as healthy as it was rare. We cannot tell; so little do we know of its tion may not be rare. mysteries, and so complicated is the machinery of education and of society by which it may be ruined or impaired. As probable as that there might be a Milton or a Hampden in Gray's presence, when he pondered his elegy, is it that there may be many Scotts in our regal halls, in our factories, in our grammar or dame schools; one weakened in the hot-bed of aristocracy, another withered by want and toil, a third choked with what is called learning, a fourth turned into a slave under the rod. It seems that some light is thrown upon the matter of educaHere is a discipline diametrition by such a case as the one before us. cally opposite to received notions of what is fitting. Here is a boy,not so unlike other boys in the outset as to make this case an exception to all rules,-here is a boy lying about in the fields when he should have been at his Latin grammar; romancing when he should have been playing cricket; reading novels when he should have been entering college; hunting ballads when he should have been poring over parchments; spearing salmon instead of embellishing a peroration; and, finally, giving up law for legends, when he should have been rising at the bar. Yet this personage came out of this wild kind of discipline, graced with the rarest combination of qualifications for enjoying existence, achieving fame, and blessing society; with manners which were admitted by a king to ornament a court, although his accomplishments were to be referred solely to intellectual culture, and in no degree impaired the honesty of his speech and action; deeply learned, though neither the languages nor the philosophy of the schools made part of his acquisi

tions; robust as a ploughman, able to walk like a pedlar, and to ride like a knight-errant, and to hunt like a squire; business-like as a bailiff; industrious as a handicraftsman; discreet and frank to perfection at the same time; gentle as a woman; intrepid as the bravest hero of his own immortal works. Here is an extraordinary phenomenon, to result from an education which would give most people the expectation of a directly contrary issue. Here is enough to put us, on inquiring, not whether learning, and even school discipline, be good things, but whether the knowledge usually thought most essential, the school discipline, which is commonly esteemed indispensable, be in fact either the one or the other; whether the study of nature, in her apparent forms, may not be found a much more powerful stimulus to thought than it is at present allowed to be, let the study be pursued among the hills of Tweeddale, or in the laboratory, Botanic Garden, or Observatory: whether again, the discipline of pain and pleasure, appointed by Providence, may not effect more by being less interfered with than it is under our present educational methods, which leave scarcely any experience pure from artificial admixture. Many parents will say that they do not wish their children to become poets and romance writers, and will plead that Walter Scott was but little of a lawyer after all. But it should be remembered, that the generation and direction of power are very different things. It was the discipline of natural vicissitude which generated power in Walter Scott; its direction was owing to local and individual circumstances. The example might be followed exactly in the first particular, and only analogically in the other. This might be done without any apprehension; for no one will deny the practicability that there was for turning Sir Walter's genius in some other direction, if it had been thought desirable. There was such a practical character about all his undertakings, such good sense pervading his conversation and views of life, that there can be no doubt of his power being of that highest kind, which is as flexible as it is strong; which can change its aims as readily as it can pursue them perseveringly. The question is, how to obtain this power, much more than how to direct it. The movements of society must not, it seems, be trusted to originate it; but the pressure of society may probably be trusted to direct it.

While few inquiries can be more interesting than that of how the genius of Scott grew up, few contemplations can be more pleasurable, more animating, than that of the same genius in its matured state. It is difficult to decide where to begin in reviewing the qualities which serve as tests of its healthfulness; but perhaps the most striking, not from its predominance, (where none can be said to predominate,) but from its importance, is its purity.

This purity is not solely to be ascribed to the purity of the aliment on which the genius was nourished. All the aliment presented to genius is pure in itself, whether it be the tranquil beauty of blue skies and verdant hills, or the mournful beauty which sanctifies the relics of things passed away, or the idealized beauty of works of art, or the suggestive beauty of passing circumstances, or that moving pageant in which many see no beauty, that display of society, in which crime, littleness, and wo, are mixed up with whatever is more honourable to humanity. All these things are pure, in as far as their action upon genius is concerned, as stimulants of sensibility, and provocatives to thought; and there can be little doubt that Scott would, if placed, without Byron's training, in Byron's position, amidst the licentious intrigues of fashionable life, have

painted that life in all its hideous truth, with perfect purity of spirit. There is no more reasonable doubt of this than that Byron would have carried his stormy passions with him into the stillest nooks of Tweeddale, and wakened the echoes of Smailholm Tower with his bitter mockery of certain of his race. It is not the material on which genius employs itself that can ever be impure; since genius has nothing conventional in its constitution, and the purity or impurity which is thought to reside in objects, is wholly conventional. All depends upon how the material is received; whether as the food of appetite, or of the affections, chastened by philosophy. It is not true genius which defrauds its own aliment for its own pleasure; and where depravity exists in combination with genius, it is by a forced connexion, and the depravity goes to feed the appetites, while the genius finds its nourishment elsewhere. Such a combination exhibits the two-headed monster of the moral world, one of whose countenances may be regarding the starry heavens, while the other is gloating over the garbage of impurity beneath it. The employment of the one has nothing whatever to do with the contemplation of the other. The genius of an artist is no more answerable for his gluttony or drunkenness, than his gluttony and drunkenness for his genius. Where genius is somewhat less unfortunate in its connexion, where it is linked with the licentiousness of caste and custom, rather than with that of brutality, it is supposed to be nourished by this licentiousness, and Don Juan is appealed to as a proof; but it is not the licentiousness, but the knowledge of human passions, gained by its means, (a knowledge which might be much better gained by a thousand higher means,) by which the genius is enriched. Genius accepts the knowledge, and rejects the poison amidst which it is conveyed. The more the experience savours of impurity, the less is there for genius to appropriate; the more there is of philosophic investigation, (and this was at the bottom of much of Byron's pursuit of experience,) the more is genius profited, and the less base are the excesses with which it is mixed up. Where, with this philosophical investigation, is united that chastened affection for humanity which makes the observer far-sighted, and connects him with his race by generous sympathies instead of selfish instincts, no impurity can attend any knowledge whatever of the doings of the race, no more than pollution could dim the brightness of an angelic presence passing through a Turkish harem, or kindle unholy fires in the eyes of the Lady while watching the rabble-rout of Comus. The genius of Scott was not only innocent as the imagination of a child-all genius is so in itself-it was also pure; that is, it did not bring into combination with itself any thing which could deteriorate its power, or defile its lustre. His purity of thought and feeling was not of the still and cold, but of the active and genial characIt was not like the mountain snow, which is all whiteness under common circumstances, but which, if by chance melted, may be found to have held many dark specks congealed within it; but rather like the running stream, which catches light, warmth, and colouring, from all substances through which it passes, and sweeps away, or buries, all with which it has no affinity. No one can dispute Walter Scott's knowledge of life, and his insight into the mysteries of society. He could have told, more than most men, of the intrigues of courts, the licentiousness of nobles, the secret revels of divers classes of men, and the excesses which follow close on both the gratification and the disappointment of all the stronger passions. No one had a warmer sympathy with the stirrings in men's bosoms, or could make larger allowance for frailty, or feel more genially

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the pleasures of conviviality and other social excitement; yet no man was ever more remarkable for combining perfect purity of conception with truth and freedom of delineation. He was himself temperate in his habits as genial in his temperament; and his works are like himself. The Templar, Varney, Mike Lambourne, Christian Dalgarno, find each their place in his pictures of life-they are not made the text of a sermon, but rather allowed to speak for themselves in a not very sermonlike style; and the issue is, that they leave on the mind of the reader not a single impression which can defile, but instead, a conviction that, as respects the mind of the author, they came and went, leaving no spot or stain behind..

Closely allied with the purity of Scott's genius was its modesty-a modesty as astonishing to his distant admirers as it ever was amusing to his near friends. It is scarcely possible to imagine how, with his quick sense of the good and the beautiful, he should have remained so innocent of all suspicion of how much there was of both in his own works. If the ingenuousness of his mind had been less remarkable than it was, there would have been a pretty general suspicion that he was not above the common affectation of pretending to dispute the decision of the public; but the entire simplicity of his speech and conduct place his ingenuousness beyond question. It is certain that he alone failed to perceive or to bear in mind the power and richness of his own conceptions and delineations, while it is no less certain that, if he had met with the most insignificant of his characters in any other novel, or had (like Dr. Priestley) stumbled upon a forgotten odd volume of his own, without the titlepage, and had not known whither to refer it, he would have fallen into an enthusiasm of admiration upon it, as, to the great amusement of his friends, he was wont to do about productions of much inferior merit. Credulous as he was where merit was to be ascribed, here only he declined taking every body's word. Deferential as he was to the voice of society, here only he evaded its decision. Sometimes he seemed scarcely aware what was comprehended in the words of its laudatory decrees: sometimes he ascribed his success to novelty, sometimes to fashion; now to one temporary influence, now to another—to any thing rather than his own merit. This modesty so verges upon excess as to cause some passing feelings of regret, that it was impossible to inspire him with a due sense of what he had done, with that virtuous complacency which is the fair reward of such toils as his; till we remember that he could not but have had his private raptures over the beauties of his own creation; his thrillings of pleasure in converse with the divine Die Vernon, and of lofty emotion when winding up his most solemn scenes; and his paroxysms of mirth after calling up a Friar Tuck, or a Triptolemus Yellowley; till, reminded by the world that all these bore the closest connexion with himself, they, with the pride of pleasure they had afforded, were swallowed up and forgotten in his modesty. That they should be thus forgotten or lightly esteemed, still seems unfair, however the fact may be accounted for; and it is a positive relief to meet with a notice here and there, in Sir Walter's notes and prefaces, which indicate that he did derive some gratification from his success, that he did consent to taste a little of the delicious brimming cup which his brethren of the craft are usually all too ready to drain before it is half full. "I have seldom," he says, "felt more satisfaction than when, returning from a pleasure voyage, I found Waverley in the zenith of popularity, and public curiosity in full cry after the