mfort within--was the first home he
knew, and his residence up to manhood. No boy could be more an Edinburgh
boy. Lame though he was, he climbed every dangerous point upon the
hills, and knew the recesses of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags by
heart before he knew his Latin grammar. His schoolboy fights, his
snowballing, the little armies of urchins set in battle array, the
friendly feuds of gentle and simple (sometimes attended by hard knocks,
as among his own Liddesdale farmers), fill the streets with amusing
recollections. And when he was promoted in due time to the Parliament
House and to all the frolics of the youthful Bar, and his proud father
steps forth in the snuff-coloured suit which Mr. Saunders Fairford wore
after him, to tell his friends that "my son Walter passed his private
Scots law examination with good approbation," and on Friday "puts on the
gown and gives a bit chack of dinner to his friends and acquaintances,
as is the custom," how familiar and kindly is the scene, how the sober
house lights up, and the good wine about which we have known all our
lives comes out of the cellar and the jokes fly round--Parliament House
pleasantries and recollections of the witticisms of the Bench gradually
giving place to the sallies of the wild young wits, the shaft from the
new-bent bow of the young advocate himself. Nothing can be more true and
simple than he is through all the tale, or more real than the Edinburgh
atmosphere; the fun that is mostly in the foreground; the work that is
pushed into corners yet always gets done, though it has not the air of
being important except to the excellent father whose steps on the stair
are the signal for the disappearance of a chess-board into a drawer or a
romance under the papers,--well-known tricks of youth which we have all
been guilty of. There is a curious evidence, however, in Lockhart's
_Life_, less known than the usual tales of frolic and apparent idleness,
of the professional trick of Scott's handwriting, which showed how
steadily he must have laboured even in his delightful, easy, innocently
irregular youth. "I allude particularly to a sort of flourish at the
bottom of the page, originally, I presume, adopted in engrossing as a
safeguard against the intrusion of a forged line between the legitimate
text and the attesting signature. He was quite sensible," adds his
biographer, "that this ornament might as well be dispensed with; and his
family often heard him mutter