, as Sir
Walter has said, interminable--for we were unwilling to have any
of our favorite knights killed. Our passion for romance led us to
learn Italian together; after a time we could both read it with
fluency, and we then copied such tales as we had met with in that
language, being a continued succession of battles and
enchantments. He began early to collect old ballads, and as my
mother could repeat a great many, he used to come and learn those
she could recite to him. He used to get all the copies of these
ballads he could, and select the best."

[Footnote 57: George, ninth Earl of Dalhousie, highly
distinguished in the military annals of his time, died on the
21st March, 1838, in his 68th year.]

These, {p.106} no doubt, were among the germs of the collection of
ballads in six little volumes, which, from the handwriting, had been
begun at this early period, and which is still preserved at
Abbotsford. And it appears that at least as early a date must be
ascribed to another collection of little humorous stories in prose,
the _Penny Chap-books_, as they are called, still in high favor among
the lower classes in Scotland, which stands on the same shelf. In a
letter of 1830[58] he states that he had bound up things of this kind
to the extent of several volumes, before he was ten years old.

[Footnote 58: See Strang's _Germany in 1831_, vol. i. p.
265.]

Although the Ashestiel Memoir mentions so very lightly his boyish
addiction to verse, and the rebuke which his vein received from the
apothecary's blue-buskined wife as having been followed by similar
treatment on the part of others, I am inclined to believe that while
thus devouring, along with his young friend, the stories of Italian
romance, he essayed, from time to time, to weave some of their
materials into rhyme;--nay, that he must have made at least one rather
serious effort of this kind, as early as the date of these rambles to
the Salisbury Crags. I have found among his mother's papers a copy of
verses, headed, "_Lines to Mr. Walter Scott--on reading his poem of
Guiscard and Matilda, inscribed to Miss Keith of Ravelston_." There is
no date; but I conceive the lines bear internal evidence of having
been written when he was very young--not, I should suppose, above
fourteen or fifteen at most. I think it also certain that the writer
was a woman; and have almost as little