e or two of these gentlemen could speak
no English at all, he made some efforts to amuse them in their own
language after {p.114} the champagne had been passing briskly round
the table; and I was amused next morning with the expression of one of
the party, who, alluding to the sort of reading in which Sir Walter
seemed to have chiefly occupied himself, said, "Mon Dieu! comme il
estropiait, entre deux vins, le Francais du bon sire de Joinville!" Of
all these tongues, as of German somewhat later, he acquired as much as
was needful for his own purposes, of which a critical study of any
foreign language made at no time any part. In them he sought for
incidents, and he found images; but for the treasures of diction he
was content to dig on British soil. He had all he wanted in the old
wells of "English undefiled," and the still living, though fast
shrinking, waters of that sister idiom which had not always, as he
flattered himself, deserved the name of a dialect.

As may be said, I believe, with perfect truth of every really great
man, Scott was self-educated in every branch of knowledge which he
ever turned to account in the works of his genius--and he has himself
told us that his real studies were those lonely and desultory ones of
which he has given a copy in the third chapter of Waverley, where the
hero is represented as "driving through the sea of books, like a
vessel without pilot or rudder;" that is to say, obeying nothing but
the strong breath of native inclination:--"He had read, and stored in
a memory of uncommon tenacity, much curious, though ill-arranged and
miscellaneous information. In English literature, he was master of
Shakespeare and Milton, of our earlier dramatic authors, of many
picturesque and interesting passages from our old historical
chronicles, and was particularly well acquainted with Spenser,
Drayton, and other poets, who have exercised themselves on romantic
fiction,--_of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful
imagination, before the passions have roused themselves, and demand
poetry of a more sentimental description_." I need not repeat his
enumeration of other favorites, Pulci, the {p.115} Decameron,
Froissart, Brantome, Delanoue, and the chivalrous and romantic lore of
Spain. I have quoted a passage so well known, only for the sake of the
striking circumstance by which it marks the very early date of these
multifarious studies.

CHAPTER V {p.116}

Illustrations Continued