ore than its original
freshness of life. With such scenes touching even his own home, Scott
must have been constantly taught to balance in his own mind, the more
romantic, against the more sober and rational considerations, which
had so recently divided house against house, even in the same family
and clan. That the stern Calvinistic lawyer should have retained so
much of his grandfather Beardie's respect for the adherents of the
exiled house of Stuart, must in itself have struck the boy as even
more remarkable than the passionate loyalty of the Stuarts' professed
partisans, and have lent a new sanction to the romantic drift of his
mother's old traditions, and one to which they must have been indebted
for a great part of their fascination.

Walter Scott, the ninth of twelve children, of whom the first six died
in early childhood, was born in Edinburgh, on the 15th of August,
1771. Of the six later-born children, all but one were boys, and the
one sister was a somewhat querulous invalid, whom he seems to have
pitied almost more than he loved. At the age of eighteen months the
boy had a teething-fever, ending in a life-long lameness; and this was
the reason why the child was sent to reside with his grandfather--the
speculative grandfather, who had doubled his capital by buying a
racehorse instead of sheep--at Sandy-Knowe, near the ruined tower of
Smailholm, celebrated afterwards in his ballad of _The Eve of St.
John_, in the neighbourhood of some fine crags. To these crags the
housemaid sent from Edinburgh to look after him, used to carry him up,
with a design (which she confessed to the housekeeper)--due, of
course, to incipient insanity--of murdering the child there, and
burying him in the moss. Of course the maid was dismissed. After this
the child used to be sent out, when the weather was fine, in the safer
charge of the shepherd, who would often lay him beside the sheep. Long
afterwards Scott told Mr. Skene, during an excursion with Turner, the
great painter, who was drawing his illustration of Smailholm tower for
one of Scott's works, that "the habit of lying on the turf there among
the sheep and the lambs had given his mind a peculiar tenderness for
these animals, which it had ever since retained." Being forgotten one
day upon the knolls when a thunderstorm came on, his aunt ran out to
bring him in, and found him shouting, "Bonny! bonny!" at every flash
of lightning. One of the old servants at Sandy-Knowe spoke of