riage to a lady of some means, no doubt diminished still
further his professional zeal. For one third of the time during which
Scott practised as an advocate he made no pretence of taking interest
in that part of his work, though he was always deeply interested in
the law itself. In 1806 he undertook gratuitously the duties of a
Clerk of Session--a permanent officer of the Court at Edinburgh--and
discharged them without remuneration for five years, from 1806 to
1811, in order to secure his ultimate succession to the office in the
place of an invalid, who for that period received all the emoluments
and did none of the work. Nevertheless Scott's legal abilities were so
well known, that it was certainly at one time intended to offer him a
Barony of the Exchequer, and it was his own doing, apparently, that it
was not offered. The life of literature and the life of the Bar hardly
ever suit, and in Scott's case they suited the less, that he felt
himself likely to be a dictator in the one field, and only a postulant
in the other. Literature was a far greater gainer by his choice, than
Law could have been a loser. For his capacity for the law he shared
with thousands of able men, his capacity for literature with few or
none.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 269-71.]

[Footnote 6: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 206.]

[Footnote 7: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 221.]

CHAPTER III.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE.

One Sunday, about two years before his call to the bar, Scott offered
his umbrella to a young lady of much beauty who was coming out of the
Greyfriars Church during a shower; the umbrella was graciously
accepted; and it was not an unprecedented consequence that Scott fell
in love with the borrower, who turned out to be Margaret, daughter of
Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart Belches, of Invernay. For near six years
after this, Scott indulged the hope of marrying this lady, and it does
not seem doubtful that the lady herself was in part responsible for
this impression. Scott's father, who thought his son's prospects very
inferior to those of Miss Stuart Belches, felt it his duty to warn the
baronet of his son's views, a warning which the old gentleman appears
to have received with that grand unconcern characteristic of elderly
persons in high position, as a hint intrinsically incredible, or at
least unworthy of notice. But he took no alarm, and Scott's attentions
to Margaret Stuart Belches contin