24. SIR WALTER SCOTT. 1. Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1771. At the age of eighteen he was placed in the High School of Edinburgh, where he remained for four years. He was not regarded as a very bright scholar, but gave evidence of special delight in history, poetry, fairy tales, and romances. Even then he excelled in devising and telling stories. 2. He was afterwards for a short time in the University, but left it without adding much to his stock of classical knowledge. At the age of fifteen, the breaking of a blood-vessel brought on a fit of illness, during which he passed his time in a perusal of old romances, plays, and ballads, unconsciously amassing materials for his future writings. 3. In 1792 he was called to the bar, and seven years later he was appointed Sheriff, and then Clerk of the Court of Sessions. His first publication was "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border;" then followed "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," "Marmion," and "The Lady of the Lake." In 1814 appeared anonymously "Waverley," and a new novel appeared every year till 1831. 4. These prose fictions made "The Great Unknown," as he was called, the wonder of the age. He became The World's Story-Teller. He did not reveal the authorship till after the bankruptcy of his publishers, which involved him to the amount of more than $500,000. 5. This great amount of indebtedness he pledged himself to pay without abatement, and heroically did he fulfill his promise; but the effort cost him his life. His mind gave way under the gigantic toil to which he had doomed himself, and he died at Abbotsford, in 1832. 6. His works are among the classics of the English language. R. H. Hutton says of his novels: "You can hardly read any novel of Scott's and not become better aware what public life and public issues mean. The boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and you see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites, and freebooters, preachers, school-masters, mercenary soldiers, gypsies, and beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in their circumstances, and under the same conditions of time and place, and parentage, he, too, might have lived." 7. His nature was manly, open, tolerant, and kindly. "He died," said Gladstone, "a great man, and, what is more, a good man. He has left us a double treasure: the memory of himself, and the possession of his works." Read "The Lady of the Lake," "Ivanhoe." 25. THE LADY OF THE LAKE. [The scene of this poem is laid in the vicinity of Loch Katrine, in the Highlands of Scotland;-time, about 1530. A solitary huntsman, who had outstripped his comrades, and missed the stag he was pursuing, was brought to a sudden halt by the death of his horse, from exhaustion, in the heart of the Trosachs. He blew a loud blast of his horn to recall the hounds, now crippled and sulky, from their vain pursuit. The extract represents him as pausing for a time to take in the beauty of the scene, when he again winds his horn, and the story proceeds.] The western waves of ebbing day Where twined the path, in shadow hid, Wild crests as pagod ever decked, Nor were these earth-born castles bare, All twinkling with the dew-drops' sheen, The primrose pale and violet flower With boughs that quaked at every breath, Cast anchor in the rifted rock; And, higher yet, the pine-tree hung The summer heaven's delicious blue; * And now, to issue from the glen, No pathway meets the wanderer's ken, The broom's tough roots his ladder made, And mountains, that like giants stand, To sentinel enchanted land.- But hosts may in these wilds abound, May call some straggler of the train; Just as the hunter left his stand, To view this Lady of the Lake. |