SCOTT, Sir WALTER, the fourth child of Walter Scott, writer to the signet in Edin burgh, was born in ilea city on Aug. 15. 1771. He came of the old border family, the Scotts of Harden, an offshoot from the house of Bncelench. • Though he matured, into nun or robust health, and of strength nearly herculean, as a child he was feeble and sickly. and very early he was smitten with a lameness which remained with him through life. His childhood urns passed for the most part at Sandyknowe, the farm of his grand father. in Roximrglishire. Here the foundations of his mind were laid; and his early and delighted familiarity with the ballads and legends then floating over all that part of the country, probably did more than any other influence in determine the sphere and modes of his future literary activity. .Between time years 1779 and 1783 be attended the high school of Editiburels where despite occasional flashes of talent, he shone considerably more ou the playground as a bold, high-spirited, and indomitable little fellow, with an odd turn for story-telling, than within lie did as a student. In 17S3 he went to the uni versity, and for three years Ile remained there, as it seemed, not greatly to his advanmee. Afterward, in the height of his 'am, he was wont to speak with deep regret of his neg lect of his early opportunities. But though leaving college but scantily furnished with the knowledge formally taught there, in a desultory way of his own he had been hiving up stores of valuable though unasserted information. From his earliest childhood onward he was a ravenous and insatiable reader; his memory was of extraordinary range and tenacity. and of what he either read or observed he seems to have forgotten almost nothing. Of Isola he knew little, of Greek, less; but at serviceable, if somewhat inexact knowledge of French, Italian, Spanish, and German he had acquired, and he continued to retain. On the whole, for his special purposes, his education was perhaps as available as if he had been the pride of all his preceptors. In 17s6 lie was articled apprentice to his father, in whose otlice lie worked as a clerk till 1792, in which year he was culled to the bar. In his profession he had fair success, and in 1797he was married to Charlotte Margaret Carpenter, a lady of French birth and parentage. Toward the end of 1799. through the interest of his friends lord Melville and the dime of Bucelench, he was made sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire. an appointment which brought him £300 year, with not very much to do for it. Meantime, in a tentative and intermittent way, his leisure had been occupied with literature, which more and more distinctly announced itself as the main business of his life. His first publication, a translation of Burgers ballads, Lenore and The Wild Huntsman, was issued in 1790. In 1798 appeared his translation of Goalie's drama of Goetz von Berlichingen; and in the year following be wrote the fine ballads. Glenfinlas, the Ere of St. John, and the Grey Brother. The year 1809 gave to the world the first two volumes of his Border Minstrels. y. which were fol lowed in 1803 by a third and final one. This work, the fruit of those `• raids"—as Le called them—over the border counties, in which he. had been wont to spend his vaca tions, was most favorably received by the public, and at once won for him a prominent place the literary men of the time. In 1801 he issaeJ of the oil poem Sir Thstranz, admirably edited and elucidated by valuahls dissertations. Mean time The Lay of the Last Miastrelhad been in progress. and by its publiestion in 1803 Scott became at a bound the most popular author of his day. During this next ten years, besides a mass of miscellaneous work, the most important items of which were elabor ate editions of Dryden (1808) and of Swift (1814), including in either case a Life, he gave to the world the poems Martnion (1808); The Lady of the Lake (1810); ne Vision of Don Roderick (1811); Rtkeby (1813); 2'he Bridal 11 Trierozain, anonymously published( 1813); The Lord of the Isles; and The Field of Waterloo. The enthusiasm with which the earlier
of these works were received somewhat began to abate as the series proceeded. The charm of novelty was no longer felt; moreover, a distinct deterioration in quality is not in the later poems to be denied; and in the, bold outburst of Byron, with his deeper vein of sentiment and concentrated energy of passion, a formidable rival had appeared. All this Scott distinctly noted, and after what he felt as the comparative failure of The Lord of the Isles in 1815, with the trivial exception of the anonymous piece There'd the Daunt less (1817), lie published no more poetry. Bat already in liroverley, which appeared without his name in 1814, he bad achieved the first of a new and more splendid series of triumphs. Goy .Mannertng; The Antiquary; The Thick Dmarf• Old Mortality; Rob Roy; and The Heart of Midlothian rapidly followed, and the "Great Unknown," as he was called (whom yet every one could very well guess to he no other than Walter Scott), became the idol of the hour. The rest of time famous series, known as the Waverley novels, it would be idle to mention in detail. From this time onward, for some years, Scott stood on such a pinnacle of fame and brilliant social prosperity as no other British man of letters has ever gone near to reach. He resided chiefly at Abbotsford, the "romance in stone" he had built himself in the border country which he loved, and thither, as "pilgrims of his genius," summer after summer repaired crowds of the noble and the distinguished, to partake the princely hospitalities of a omen whom they found as delightful in the easy intercourse of his home, as before they had found him in his writings. In 1820, to set a seal upon all this distinction, a baronetcy was bestowed upon him as a special mark of the royal favor. Bat the stately fabric of his fortunes, secure as it seemed, was in secret built upon the shifting sands of commercial speculation, and in the disastrous crisis of the year 1826 a huge ruin smote it. In 1803 Scott's income, as calcu lated by his biographer, was something nigh £1000 a year, irrespective of what literature might bring him; a handsome competency, shortly by his appointment to a clerkship of the court of session, to have an increment at first of £800. subsequently of £1300. But what was ample for all prosaic needs. seemed poor to his inummination with its fond and glittering dreams. Already some such vision, as at Abbotsford was afterward real ized, flitted before his mioursese. and it was the darling ambition of his heart to re-create and leave behind him. in the of a family, sonic image of the olden glories which were the life of his literary inspirations. In the year above mentioned, lured by the prospect, of profit, and without the knowledge of as friends, he joined James Bid lantync, an old schoolfellow, in the establishment of a large printing business in FAlinhnrrit. To this, a few years afterward, a publishing business was added, under the nominal conduct of .John Ballantyne, a brother of James; Scott, in the new adventure, becoming as before a partner; Gradually the affairs of the two firms became complicated with those of the great house of Constable 47, Cu., in the sudden collapse sf which Scott found himself one forenoon a bankrupt, with personal liabilities to the extent of something like 1150,000.