which he had spent
the whole capital in hand. _This_ speculation, however, prospered. A
few days later Robert Scott displayed the qualities of the hunter to
such admirable effect with John Scott of Harden's hounds, that he sold
the horse for double the money he had given, and, unlike his grandson,
abandoned speculative purchases there and then. In the latter days of
his clouded fortunes, after Ballantyne's and Constable's failure, Sir
Walter was accustomed to point to the picture of his grandfather and
say, "Blood will out: my building and planting was but his buying the
hunter before he stocked his sheep-walk, over again." But Sir Walter
added, says Mr. Lockhart, as he glanced at the likeness of his own
staid and prudent father, "Yet it was a wonder, too, for I have a
thread of the attorney in me," which was doubtless the case; nor was
that thread the least of his inheritances, for from his father
certainly Sir Walter derived that disposition towards conscientious,
plodding industry, legalism of mind, methodical habits of work, and a
generous, equitable interpretation of the scope of all his obligations
to others, which, prized and cultivated by him as they were, turned a
great genius, which, especially considering the hare-brained element
in him, might easily have been frittered away or devoted to worthless
ends, to such fruitful account, and stamped it with so grand an
impress of personal magnanimity and fortitude. Sir Walter's father
reminds one in not a few of the formal and rather martinetish traits
which are related of him, of the father of Goethe, "a formal man, with
strong ideas of strait-laced education, passionately orderly (he
thought a good book nothing without a good binding), and never so much
excited as by a necessary deviation from the 'pre-established harmony'
of household rules." That description would apply almost wholly to the
sketch of old Mr. Scott which the novelist has given us under the thin
disguise of Alexander Fairford, Writer to the Signet, in
_Redgauntlet_, a figure confessedly meant, in its chief features, to
represent his father. To this Sir Walter adds, in one of his later
journals, the trait that his father was a man of fine presence, who
conducted all conventional arrangements with a certain grandeur and
dignity of air, and "absolutely loved a funeral." "He seemed to
preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of cousins merely for the
pleasure of being at their funerals, which he was ofte