d in
what any one proposed; but if I was once driven to make a choice, and
felt piqued in honour to maintain my proposition, I have broken off
from the whole party, rather than yield to any one." No doubt, too, in
that day of what he himself described as "the silly smart fancies that
ran in my brain like the bubbles in a glass of champagne, as brilliant
to my thinking, as intoxicating, as evanescent," solitude was no real
deprivation to him; and one can easily imagine him marching off on his
solitary way after a dispute with his companions, reciting to himself
old songs or ballads, with that "noticeable but altogether
indescribable play of the upper lip," which Mr. Lockhart thinks
suggested to one of Scott's most intimate friends, on his first
acquaintance with him, the grotesque notion that he had been "a
hautboy-player." This was the first impression formed of Scott by
William Clerk, one of his earliest and life-long friends. It greatly
amused Scott, who not only had never played on any instrument in his
life, but could hardly make shift to join in the chorus of a popular
song without marring its effect; but perhaps the impression suggested
was not so very far astray after all. Looking to the poetic side of
his character, the trumpet certainly would have been the instrument
that would have best symbolized the spirit both of Scott's thought and
of his verses. Mr. Lockhart himself, in summing up his impressions of
Sir Walter, quotes as the most expressive of his lines:--

"Sound, sound the clarion! fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth a world without a name."

And undoubtedly this gives us the key-note of Scott's personal life as
well as of his poetic power. Above everything he was high-spirited, a
man of noble, and, at the same time, of martial feelings. Sir Francis
Doyle speaks very justly of Sir Walter as "among English singers the
undoubted inheritor of that trumpet-note, which, under the breath of
Homer, has made the wrath of Achilles immortal;" and I do not doubt
that there was something in Scott's face, and especially in the
expression of his mouth, to suggest this even to his early college
companions. Unfortunately, however, even "one crowded hour of glorious
life" may sometimes have a "sensual" inspiration, and in these days of
youthful adventure, too many such hours seem to have owed their
inspiration to the Scottish peasant's chief