of steady, sober diligence, which
few imaginative authors had ever before exemplified--and which, unless
thus beaten into his composition at a ductile stage, even he, in all
probability, could never have carried into the almost professional
exercise of some of the highest and most delicate faculties of the
human mind. He speaks, in not the least remarkable passage of the
preceding Memoir, as if constitutional indolence had been his portion
in common with all the members of his father's family. When Gifford,
in a dispute with Jacob Bryant, quoted Doctor Johnson's own confession
that he knew little Greek, Bryant answered, "Yes, young man; but how
shall we know what Johnson would have called much Greek?" and Gifford
has recorded the deep impression which this hint left on his own mind.
What Scott would have called constitutional diligence, I know not; but
surely, if indolence of any kind had been inherent in his nature, even
the triumph of Socrates was not more signal than his.

It will be, by some of my friends, considered as trivial to remark on
such a circumstance--but the reader who is {p.118} unacquainted with
the professional habits of the Scotch lawyers may as well be told that
the Writer's Apprentice receives a certain allowance in money for
every page he transcribes; and that, as in those days the greater part
of the business, even of the supreme courts, was carried on by means
of written papers, a ready penman, in a well-employed chamber, could
earn in this way enough, at all events, to make a handsome addition to
the pocket-money which was likely to be thought suitable for a youth
of fifteen by such a man as the elder Scott. The allowance being, I
believe, threepence for every page containing a certain fixed number
of words, when Walter had finished, as he tells us he occasionally
did, 120 pages within twenty-four hours, his fee would amount to
thirty shillings; and in his early letters I find him more than once
congratulating himself on having been, by some such exertion, enabled
to purchase a book, or a coin, otherwise beyond his reach. A
schoolfellow, who was now, like himself, a Writer's Apprentice,
recollects the eagerness with which he thus made himself master of
Evans's Ballads, shortly after their publication; and another of them,
already often referred to, remembers, in particular, his rapture with
Mickle's Cumnor Hall, which first appeared in that collection. "After
the labors of the day were over," s