h was not in his
days at all an extravagant place of living. Even when he married, he was
by no means badly off. His wife, though not exactly an heiress, had
means which had been estimated at five hundred a year, and which seem
never to have fallen below two hundred; Scott's fees averaged about
another two hundred; he evidently had an allowance from his father (who
had been very well off, and was still not poor), and before very long
the Sheriffship of Selkirkshire added three hundred more, though he
seems to have made this an excuse for giving up practice, which he had
never much liked. His father's death in 1799 put him in possession of
some property; legacies from relations added more. Before the
publication of the _Lay_ (when he was barely three-and-thirty), Lockhart
estimates his income, leaving fees and literary work out of the
question, at nearly if not quite a thousand a year; and a thousand a
year at the beginning of the century went as far as fifteen hundred, if
not two thousand, at its close.

Thus, with no necessity to live by his pen, with no immediate or
extraordinary temptation to use it for gain, and as yet, it would seem,
with no overmastering inducement from his genius to do so, while he at
no time of his life felt any stimulus from vanity, it is not surprising
that it was long before Scott began to write in earnest. A few childish
verse translations and exercises of his neither encourage nor forbid any
particular expectations of literature from him; they are neither better
nor worse than those of hundreds, probably thousands, of boys every
year. His first published performance, now of extreme rarity, and not,
of course, produced with any literary object, was his Latin call-thesis
on the rather curious subject (which has been, not improbably, supposed
to be connected with his German studies and the terror-literature of the
last decade of the century) of the disposal of the dead bodies of
legally executed persons. His first English work was directly the result
of the said German studies, to which, like many of his contemporaries,
he had been attracted by fashion. It consisted of nothing more than the
well-known translations of Buerger's _Lenore_ and _Wild Huntsman_, which
were issued in a little quarto volume by Manners & Miller of Edinburgh,
in October 1796--a date which has the special interest of suggesting
that Scott sought some refuge in literature from the agony of his
rejection by Miss Stuart.