d, by admiration for
that school, into attempting what was not adapted to his genius, or
else disheartened in the work for which his character and ancestry
really fitted him. It has been said that there is a real affinity
between Scott and Homer. But the long and refluent music of Homer,
once naturalized in his mind, would have discontented him with that
quick, sharp, metrical tramp of his own moss-troopers, to which alone
his genius as a poet was perfectly suited.

It might be supposed that with these romantic tastes, Scott could
scarcely have made much of a lawyer, though the inference would, I
believe, be quite mistaken. His father, however, reproached him with
being better fitted for a pedlar than a lawyer,--so persistently did
he trudge over all the neighbouring counties in search of the beauties
of nature and the historic associations of battle, siege, or legend.
On one occasion when, with their last penny spent, Scott and one of
his companions had returned to Edinburgh, living during their last day
on drinks of milk offered by generous peasant-women, and the hips and
haws on the hedges, he remarked to his father how much he had wished
for George Primrose's power of playing on the flute in order to earn a
meal by the way, old Mr. Scott, catching grumpily at the idea,
replied, "I greatly doubt, sir, you were born for nae better then a
gangrel scrape-gut,"--a speech which very probably suggested his son's
conception of Darsie Latimer's adventures with the blind fiddler,
"Wandering Willie," in _Redgauntlet_. And, it is true that these were
the days of mental and moral fermentation, what was called in Germany
the Sturm-und-Drang, the "fret-and-fury" period of Scott's life, so
far as one so mellow and genial in temper ever passed through a period
of fret and fury at all. In other words these were the days of rapid
motion, of walks of thirty miles a day which the lame lad yet found no
fatigue to him; of mad enterprises, scrapes and drinking-bouts, in one
of which Scott was half persuaded by his friends that he actually sang
a song for the only time in his life. But even in these days of
youthful sociability, with companions of his own age, Scott was always
himself, and his imperious will often asserted itself. Writing of this
time, some thirty-five years or so later, he said, "When I was a boy,
and on foot expeditions, as we had many, no creature could be so
indifferent which way our course was directed, and I acquiesce