uring a
thunder storm, clapping his hands at each flash of lightning, and
shouting "Bonny! Bonny!"--a bit of infantile intrepidity which makes
more acceptable a story of another sort illustrative of his mental
precocity. A lady entering his mother's room found him reading aloud a
description of a shipwreck, accompanying the words with excited comments
and gestures. "There's the mast gone," he cried, "crash it goes; they
will all perish!" The lady entered into his agitation with tact, and on
her departure, he told his mother that he liked their visitor, because
"she was a virtuoso, like himself." To her amused inquiry as to what a
virtuoso might be, he replied: "Don't ye know? why, 'tis one who wishes
to and will know everything."

[Footnote: 1 See Scott's ballad "The Eve of St. John."]

As a boy at school in Edinburgh and in Kelso, and afterwards as a
student at the University and apprentice in his father's law office,
Scott took his own way to become a "virtuoso"; a rather queer way it
must sometimes have seemed to his good preceptors. He refused
point-blank to learn Greek, and cared little for Latin. His scholarship
was so erratic that he glanced meteor-like from the head to the foot of
his classes and back again, according as luck gave or withheld the
question to which his highly selective memory had retained the answer.
But outside of school hours he was intensely at work to "know
everything," so far as "everything" came within the bounds of his
special tastes. Before he was ten years old he had begun to collect
chap-books and ballads. As he grew older he read omnivorously in romance
and history; at school he learned French for the sole purpose of knowing
at first hand the fascinating cycles of old French romance; a little
later he mastered Italian in order to read Dante and Ariosto, and to his
schoolmaster's indignation stoutly championed the claim of the latter
poet to superiority over Homer; a little later he acquired Spanish and
read _Don Quixote_ in the original. With such efforts, however,
considerable as they were for a boy who passionately loved a "bicker" in
the streets and who was famed among his comrades for bravery in climbing
the perilous "kittle nine stanes" on Castle Rock, he was not content.
Nothing more conclusively shows the genuineness of Scott's romantic
feeling than his willingness to undergo severe mental drudgery in
pursuit of knowledge concerning the old storied days which had
enthralled hi