n asked to
superintend, and I suspect had sometimes to pay for. He carried me
with him as often as he could to these mortuary ceremonies; but
feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental, I escaped as
often as I could." This strong dash of the conventional in Scott's
father, this satisfaction in seeing people fairly to the door of life,
and taking his final leave of them there, with something of a
ceremonious flourish of observance, was, however, combined with a
much nobler and deeper kind of orderliness. Sir Walter used to say
that his father had lost no small part of a very flourishing business,
by insisting that his clients should do their duty to their own people
better than they were themselves at all inclined to do it. And of this
generous strictness in sacrificing his own interests to his sympathy
for others, the son had as much as the father.

Sir Walter's mother, who was a Miss Rutherford, the daughter of a
physician, had been better educated than most Scotchwomen of her day,
in spite of having been sent "to be finished off" by "the honourable
Mrs. Ogilvie," whose training was so effective, in one direction at
least, that even in her eightieth year Mrs. Scott could not enjoy a
comfortable rest in her chair, but "took as much care to avoid
touching her chair with her back, as if she had still been under the
stern eyes of Mrs. Ogilvie." None the less Mrs. Scott was a motherly,
comfortable woman, with much tenderness of heart, and a well-stored,
vivid memory. Sir Walter, writing of her, after his mother's death, to
Lady Louisa Stewart, says, "She had a mind peculiarly well stored with
much acquired information and natural talent, and as she was very old,
and had an excellent memory, she could draw, without the least
exaggeration or affectation, the most striking pictures of the past
age. If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the
past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented
me. She connected a long period of time with the present generation,
for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person who perfectly
recollected the battle of Dunbar and Oliver Cromwell's subsequent
entry into Edinburgh." On the day before the stroke of paralysis which
carried her off, she had told Mr. and Mrs. Scott of Harden, "with
great accuracy, the real story of the Bride of Lammermuir, and pointed
out wherein it differed from the novel. She had all the names of the
parties, an