the first of his series
of metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour.
But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history,
legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a
finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were early
determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its
object. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript
ballads. His education in romance dated from the cradle. His lullabies
were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers, and
his Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany,"
upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly. The ballad
of "Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by heart before he could
read. "It was the first poem I ever learnt--the last I shall ever
forget." Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the poems of
Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory "whole duans of the one
and cantos of the other." "Spenser," he says, "I could have read
forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered
all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and
exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in
such society." A little later Percy's "Reliques" fell into his hands,
with results that have already been described.[3]

As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, he
began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love
stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that was
adventurous and romantic," and in particular upon "everything which
touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his
holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury
Crags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" and
the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to each other
"interminable tales of battles and enchantments" and "legends in which
the martial and the miraculous always predominated." The education of
Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott's first
novel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the "large
Gothic room" which was the library of Waverley Honour, the young
book-worm pored over "old historical chronicles" and the writings of
Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became "well acquainted