and
had just attained his majority.

"Romance who loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and folded wing,
To _him_ a painted paroquet
Had been--a most familiar bird--
Taught _him_ his alphabet to say,
To lisp his very earliest word."[19]

He had lain from infancy "in the lap of legends old," and was already
learned in the antiquities of the Border. For years he had been making
his collection of _memorabilia_; claymores, suits of mail, Jedburgh axes,
border horns, etc. He had begun his annual raids into Liddesdale, in
search of ballads and folk lore, and was filling notebooks with passages
from the Edda, records of old Scotch law-cases, copies of early English
poems, notes on the "Morte Darthur," on the second sight, on fairies and
witches; extracts from Scottish chronicles, from the Books of Adjournal,
from Aubrey, and old Glanvil of superstitious memory; tables of the
Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Runic alphabets and transcripts relating
to the history of the Stuarts. In the autumn or early winter of that
year, a class of six or seven young men was formed at Edinburgh for the
study of German, and Scott joined it. In his own account of the matter
he says that interest in German literature was first aroused in Scotland
by a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in April, 1788, by
Henry Mackenzie, the "Addison of the North," and author of that most
sentimental fictions, "The Man of Feeling." "The literary persons of
Edinburgh were then first made aware of the existence of works of genius
in a language cognate with the English, and possessed of the same manly
force of expressions; they learned at the same time that the taste which
dictated the German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to the
English as their language; those who were from their youth accustomed to
admire Shakspere and Milton became acquainted for the first time with a
race of poets who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming
boundaries of the universe and investigate the realms of Chaos and old
Night; and of dramatists who, disclaiming the pedantry of the unities,
sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities and extravagance, to
present life on the stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all
its boundless variety of character. . . Their fictitious narratives,
their ballad poetry, and other branches of their literature which are
particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagan