I find some of my readers are more interested in the last two numbers of Fors than I want them to be.

“Give up your Fors altogether, and let us have a life of Scott,” they say.

They must please to remember that I am only examining the conditions of the life of this wise man, that they may learn how to rule their own lives, or their children’s, or their servants’; and, for the present, with this particular object, that they may be able to determine, for themselves, whether ancient sentiment, or modern common sense, is to be the rule of life, and of service.

I beg them, therefore, to refer constantly to that summary of modern common sense given by Mr. Applegarth, and quoted with due commendation by the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ (above, XXVIII., 22):—

“One piece of vigorous good sense enlivened the discussion. It was uttered by Mr. Applegarth, who observed that ‘no sentiment ought to be brought into the subject.’ ”

No sentiment, you observe, is to be brought into your doing, or your whistling, according to Mr. Applegarth.

And the main purpose of Fors is to show you that there is, sometimes, in weak natural whistling quite as much virtue as in vigorous steam whistling. But it cannot show you this without explaining what your darg, or ‘doing,’ is; which cannot be shown merely by writing pleasant biographies. You are always willing enough to read lives, but never willing to lead them. For instance, those few sentences, almost casually given in last Fors, about the Scottish rivers, have been copied, I see, into various journals, as if they, at any rate, were worth extract from the much useless matter of my books. Scotchmen like to hear their rivers talked about, it appears! But when last I was up Huntly Burn way, there was no burn there. It had all been drawn off to somebody’s ‘works;’ and it is painful for me, as an author, to reflect that, “of all polluting liquids belonging to this category (liquid refuse from manufactories), the discharges from paper works are the most difficult to deal with.”1

At Edinburgh there is a railroad station instead of the North Loch; the water of Leith is—well, one cannot say in civilized company what it is;2 and at Linlithgow, of all the palaces so fair,—built for a royal dwelling, etc.,—the oil, (paraffin,) floating on the streams, can be ignited, burning with a large flame.3

My good Scottish friends, had you not better leave off pleasing yourselves with descriptions of your rivers as they were, and consider what your rivers are to be? For I correct my derivation of Clarty Hole too sorrowfully.4 It is the Ford that is clarty now—not the Hole.

To return to our sentimental work, however, for a while. I left in my last letter one or two of the most interesting points in the first year at Sandy-Knowe unnoticed, because I thought it best to give you, by comparison with each other, some idea of the three women who, as far as education could do it, formed the mind of Scott. His masters only polished and directed it. His mother, grandmother, and aunt welded the steel.

Hear first this of his mother. (Lockhart, vol. i., p. 78.)

“She had received, as became the daughter of an eminently learned physician, the best sort of education then bestowed on young gentlewomen in Scotland.” The poet, speaking of Mrs. Euphemia Sinclair, the mistress of the school at which his mother was reared, to the ingenious local antiquary, Mr. Robert Chambers, said that “she must have been possessed of uncommon talents for education, as all her young ladies were, in after-life, fond of reading, wrote and spelled admirably, were well acquainted with history and the belles lettres, without neglecting the more homely duties of the needle and accompt-book, and perfectly well-bred in society.” Mr. Chambers adds, “Sir Walter further communicated that his mother, and many others of Mrs. Sinclair’s pupils, were sent afterwards to be finished off by the Honourable Mrs. Ogilvie, a lady who trained her young friends to a style of manners which would now be considered intolerably stiff. Such was the effect of this early training upon the mind of Mrs. Scott, that even when she approached her eightieth year, she took as much care to avoid touching her chair with her back, as if she had still been under the stern eye of Mrs. Ogilvie.”

You are to note in this extract three things. First, the singular influence of education, given by a master or mistress of real power. “All her young ladies” (all, Sir Walter! do you verily mean this?) “fond of reading,” and so forth.

Well, I believe that, with slight exception, Sir Walter did mean it. He seldom wrote, or spoke, in careless generalization. And I doubt not that it is truly possible, by first insisting on a girl’s really knowing how to read, and then by allowing her very few books, and those absolutely wholesome,—and not amusing!—to give her a healthy appetite for reading. Spelling, I had thought was impossible to many girls; but perhaps this is only because it is not early enough made a point of: it cannot be learned late.

Secondly: I wish Mr. Chambers had given us Sir Walter’s words, instead of only the substance of what he “further communicated.” But you may safely gather what I want you to notice, that Sir Walter attributes the essentials of good breeding to the first careful and scholarly mistress; and only the formality, which he somewhat hesitatingly approves, to the finishing hand of Mrs. Ogilvie. He would have paid less regard to the opinion of modern society on such matters, had he lived to see our languid Paradise of sofas and rocking-chairs. The beginning, and very nearly the end, of bodily education for a girl, is to make sure that she can stand, and sit, upright; the ankle vertical, and firm as a marble shaft; the waist elastic as a reed, and as unfatiguable. I have seen my own mother travel from sunrise to sunset, in a summer’s day, without once leaning back in the carriage.

Thirdly: The respectability belonging in those days to the profession of a schoolmistress. In fact, I do not myself think that any old lady can be respectable, unless she is one, whether she be paid for her pupils or not. And to deserve to be one, makes her Honourable at once, titled or untitled.

This much comes, then, of the instructions of Mrs. Sinclair and Mrs. Ogilvie; and why should not all your daughters be educated by Honourable Mrs. Ogilvies, and learn to spell, and to sit upright? Then they will all have sons like Sir Walter Scott, you think?

Not so, good friends. Miss Rutherford had not wholly learned to sit upright from Mrs. Ogilvie. She had some disposition of her own in that kind, different from the other pupils, and taught in older schools. Look at the lines in the Lay, where Conrad of Wolfenstein,

Such the race,—such the school education,—of Scott’s mother. Of her home education, you may judge by what she herself said of her father to her son’s tutor (whose exquisitely grotesque letter, for the rest, vol. i., p. 108,) is alone enough to explain Scott’s inevitable future perception of the weakness of religious egotism.

“Mrs. Scott told me that, when prescribing for his patients, it was Dr. Rutherford’s custom to offer up, at the same time, a prayer for the accompanying blessing of heaven,—a laudable practice, in which, I fear, he has not been generally imitated by those of his profession.”

A very laudable practice indeed, good Mr. Mitchell; perhaps even a useful and practically efficacious one, on occasion; at all events one of the last remains of noble Puritanism, in its sincerity, among men of sound learning.

For Dr. Rutherford was also an excellent linguist, and, according to the custom of the times, delivered his prelections to the students in Latin, (like the conversation in Beardie’s Jacobite Club). Nowadays, you mean to have no more Latin talked, as I understand; nor prayers said. Pills—Morison’s and others—can be made up on cheaper terms, you think,—and be equally salutary?

Be it so. In these ancient manners, however, Scott’s mother is brought up, and consistently abides; doubtless, having some reverence for the Latin tongue, and much faith in the medicine of prayer;—having had troubles about her soul’s safety also; perhaps too solicitous, at one time, on that point; but being sure she has a soul to be solicitous about, which is much; obedient herself to the severest laws of morality and life; mildly and steadily enforcing them on her children; but naturally of light and happy temper, and with a strong turn to study poetry and works of imagination.

I do not say anything of his father till we come to the apprenticeship,—except only that he was no less devout than his mother, and more formal. Of training which could be known or remembered, neither he nor the mother give any to their boy until after the Sandy-Knowe time. But how of the unremembered training? When do you suppose the education of a child begins? At six months old it can answer smile with smile, and impatience with impatience. It can observe, enjoy, and suffer, acutely, and, in a measure, intelligently. Do you suppose it makes no difference to it that the order of the house is perfect and quiet, the faces of its father and mother full of peace, their soft voices familiar to its ear, and even those of strangers, loving; or that it is tossed from arm to arm, among hard, or reckless, or vain-minded persons, in the gloom of a vicious household, or the confusion of a gay one? The moral disposition is, I doubt not, greatly determined in those first speechless years. I believe especially that quiet, and the withdrawal of objects likely to distract, by amusing the child, so as to let it fix its attention undisturbed on every visible least thing in its domain, is essential to the formation of some of the best powers of thought. It is chiefly to this quietude of his own home that I ascribe the intense perceptiveness and memory of the three-years’-old child at Sandy-Knowe; for, observe, it is in that first year he learns his Hardiknute; by his aunt’s help he learns to read at Bath, and can cater for himself on his return. Of this aunt, and her mother, we must now know what we can. You notice the difference which Scott himself indicates between the two: “My grandmother, who was meekness itself, and my aunt, who was of a higher temper.” Yet his grandmother, Barbara Haliburton, was descended from the so-called, in speciality of honour, ‘Standard-bearer’ of the Douglases; and Dryburgh Abbey was part of her family’s estate, they having been true servants to the monks of it, once on a time. Here is a curious little piece of lecture on the duties of master and servant,—Royal Proclamation on the 8th of May, 1535, by James the Fifth:6 “Whereas we, having been advised, and knowing the said gentlemen, the Halliburtons, to be leal and true honest men, long servants unto the saide abbeye, for the saide landis, stout men at armes, and goode borderers against Ingland; and doe therefore decree and ordaine, that they shall be re-possess’d, and bruik and enjoy the landis and steedings they had of the said abbeye, paying the use and wonte: and that they sall be goode servants to the said venerabil father, like as they and their predecessours were to the said venerabil father, and his predecessours, and he a good master to them.” The Abbot of Dryburgh, however, and others in such high places, having thus misread their orders, and taken on themselves to be masters instead of ministers, the Reformation took its course; and Dryburgh claims allegiance no more—but to its dead.

You notice the phrase, “good borderers against England.” Lest I should have to put it off, too long, I may as well, in this place, let you know the origin of the tune which Scott’s uncle was so fond of. From the letter of one of his friends to Dr. Brown I gratefully take the following passage:—

“In the fourteenth century some English riders were slaking their thirst on the banks of the Tweed, nearly opposite Cartley Hole,—now Abbotsford,—where wild plums grew. The borderers came down upon them unexpectedly, and annihilated them, driving some into the Tweed, at a place called the Englishman’s Dyke. The borderers accordingly thought their surprise sourer fruit to the invaders than the plums they went to pluck, and christened themselves by the soubriquet of ‘Sour Plums in Galashiels,’ which gave a text for the song and tune, and a motto for the arms of the town of Galashiels.”

There is something to think of for you, when next you see the blackthorn blow, or the azure bloom spread on its bossed clusters of fruit. I cannot find any of the words of the song; but one beautiful stanza of the ballad of Cospatrick may at least serve to remind you of the beauty of the Border in its summer time:—

“Meekness itself,” and yet possibly with some pride in her also, this Barbara, with the ruins of her Dryburgh still seen grey above the woods, from the tower at whose foot her grandchild was playing. So short the space he had to travel, when his lameness should be cured,—the end of all travel already in sight!

Some pride in her, perhaps: you need not be surprised her grandchild should have a little left.

“Many a tale” (she told him) “of Watt of Harden, Wight Willie of Aikwood (Oakwood), Jamie Tellfer of the fair Dodhead, and other heroes—merry men, all of the persuasion and calling of Robin Hood and Little John. A more recent hero, but not of less note, was the celebrated De’il of Little Dean, whom she well remembered, as he had married her mother’s sister. Of this extraordinary person I learned many a story—grave and gay, comic and warlike”—(dearest, meek, grandmamma!)

“Two or three old books which lay in the window-seat were explored for my amusement in the tedious winter days. Automathes7 and Ramsay’s Tea-table Miscellany were my favourites, although, at a later period, an odd volume of Josephus’s Wars of the Jews divided my partiality.”

“Two or three old books in the window-seat,” and “an odd volume of Josephus.” How entertaining our farm library! (with the Bible, you observe;) and think how much matters have changed for the better: your package down from Mudie’s monthly, with all the new magazines, and a dozen of novels; Good Words—as many as you choose,—and Professor Tyndall’s last views on the subject of the Regelation of Ice. (Respecting which, for the sake of Scott’s first love, and for the sake also of my own first love—which was of snow, even more than water,—I have a few words to say to Professor Tyndall, but they must be for next month, as they will bitterly interrupt our sentimental proceedings.)

Nay—with your professional information that when ice breaks you can stick it together again, you have also imaginative literature of the rarest. Here—instead of Ramsay’s Tea-table Miscellany, with its Hardiknute and other ballads of softer tendency,—some of them not the best of their kind, I admit,—here you have Mr. Knatchbull-Huguessen, M.P.’s, Tales at Tea-time,8 dedicated to the schoolroom teapot, in which the first story is of the “Pea Green Nose,” and in which (opening at random) I find it related of some Mary of our modern St. Mary’s Lochs, that “Mary stepped forward hastily, when one of the lobsters sprang forward, and seized her arm in his claw, saying, in a low, agitated tone of voice,” etc. etc.

You were better off, little as you think it, with that poor library on the window-seat. Your own, at worst, though much fingered and torn;—your own mentally, still more utterly; and though the volume be odd, do you think that, by any quantity of reading, you can make your knowledge of history, even?

You are so proud of having learned to read too, and I warrant you could not read so much as Barbara Haliburton’s shield: Or, on a bend azure, three mascles of the first; in the second quarter a buckle of the second. I meant to have engraved it, but shall never get on to aunt Jessie at this rate.

“My kind and affectionate aunt, Miss Janet Scott, whose memory will ever be dear to me, used to read these works to me, with admirable patience, until I could repeat long passages by heart.”

Why admirable, Sir Walter? Surely she might have spent her time more usefully—lucratively at least—than in this manner of ‘nursing the baby.’ Might you not have been safely left, to hunt up Hardiknute, in maturer years, for yourself?

By no manner of means, Sir Walter thinks; and justly. With all his gifts, but for this aunt Janet,—for his mother,—and for Lilias Redgauntlet,—he had assuredly been only a hunting laird, and the best story-teller in the Lothians.

We scarcely ever, in our study of education, ask this most essential of all questions about a man, What patience had his mother or sister with him?

And most men are apt to forget it themselves. Pardon me for speaking of myself for a moment; (if I did not know things by my own part in them, I would not write of them at all). You know that people sometimes call me a good writer: others like to hear me speak. I seldom mis-spell or mis-pronounce a word, grossly; and can generally say what I want to say. Well, my own impression about this power, such as it may be, is that it was born with me, or gradually gained by my own study. It is only by deliberate effort that I recall the long morning hours of toil, as regular as sunrise,—toil on both sides equal,—by which, year after year, my mother forced me to learn all the Scotch paraphrases by heart, and ever so many chapters of the Bible besides, (the eighth of 1st Kings being one,—try it, good reader, in a leisure hour!) allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or misplaced; while every sentence was required to be said over and over again till she was satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect a struggle between us of about three weeks, concerning the accent of the “of” in the lines

I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct for rhythm (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns and their contents), on reciting it, “The ashes of the urn.” It was not, I say, till after three weeks’ labour, that my mother got the accent laid upon the ashes, to her mind. But had it taken three years, she would have done it, having once undertaken to do it. And, assuredly, had she not done it, I had been simply an avaricious picture collector, or perhaps even a more avaricious money collector, to this day; and had she done it wrongly, no after-study would ever have enabled me to read so much as a single line of verse.

It is impossible, either in history or biography, to arrange what one wants to insist upon wholly by time, or wholly by rational connection. You must observe that the visit to England, of which I am now going to speak, interrupts, with a brilliant display of pyrotechnic light, the steady burning of the stars above Scott’s childhood. From the teaching of his aunt, before he could read, I should like, for several reasons, to go on at once to the teaching of his mother, after he could read; but I must content myself, for the moment, with adding the catalogue of mamma’s library to that of aunt Jessie’s. On the window-seat of Sandy-Knowe—only to be got at the pith of by help of auntie—we had the odd volume of Josephus, Automathes, and two or three old books not named. A year later, mamma provides for us—now scholars ourselves—Pope’s Homer, Allan Ramsay’s Evergreen, and, for Sundays, Bunyan, Gesner’s Death of Abel, and Rowe’s (Mrs.) Letters from the Other World. But we have made our grand tour in the meantime, and have some new ideas of this world in our head; of which the reader must now consider.

“I was in my fourth year when my father was advised that the Bath waters might be of some advantage to my lameness. My affectionate aunt—although such a journey promised to a person of her retired habits anything but pleasure or amusement—undertook as readily to accompany me to the wells of Bladud, as if she had expected all the delight that ever the prospect of a watering-place held out to its most impatient visitants.”

And why should she not? Does it not seem somewhat strange to you, from what you know of young, or even middle-aged, aunt Jessies of the present day, that Miss Scott should look upon the journey to Bath as so severe a piece of self-denial; and that her nephew regards her doing so as a matter of course?

How old was aunt Jessie, think you? Scott’s father, the eldest of a large family, was born in 1729,—in this year, therefore, was forty-six. If we uncharitably suppose Miss Jessie the next oldest, she would be precisely of the age of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble; and one could fancy her, it seems to me, on the occasion of this unforeseen trip to the most fashionable watering-place in England, putting up her “rose-collard neglegay with green robins, and her bloo quilted petticot,” without feeling herself in the position of a martyr led to the stake. But aunt Jessie must really have been much younger than Mrs. Tabitha, and have had the advantage of her in other particulars besides spelling. She was afterwards married, and when Lockhart saw her (1820?)—forty years or so after this—had still “the softest eye and the sweetest voice.” And from the thatched mansion of the moorland, Miss Jessie feels it so irksome and solemn a duty—does she?—to go to “the squares, the circus, and the parades, which put you” (Miss Lydia Melford) “in mind of the sumptuous palaces represented in prints and pictures; and the new buildings, such as Prince’s Row, Harlequin’s Row, Bladud’s Row, and twenty other rows besides,”—not to speak of a real pump in a pump-room, with a handle to it, and other machinery, instead of the unpumped Tweed!

Her nephew, however, judges her rightly. Aunt Jessie could give him no truer proof of faithful affection than in the serenity with which she resolves to take him to this centre of gaiety.

Whereupon, you are to note this, that the end of all right education for a woman is to make her love her home better than any other place; that she should as seldom leave it as a queen her queendom; nor ever feel entirely at rest but within its threshold.

For her boy, however, there are things to be seen in Bath, and to be learned. “I acquired the rudiments of reading from an old dame near our lodgings, and I had never a more regular teacher, though I think I did not attend her more than a quarter of a year. An occasional lesson from my aunt supplied the rest.” Yes, little Walter. If we indeed have a mind to our book, that is all the teaching we want; we shall perhaps get through a volume or two in time.

“The circumstances I recollect of my residence in Bath are but trifling; yet I never recall them without a feeling of pleasure. The beauties of the Parade (which of them I know not), with the river Avon winding around it, and the lowing of the cattle from the opposite hills, are warm in my recollection, and are only rivalled by the splendours of a toy-shop somewhere near the Orange Grove. I had acquired, I know not by what means, a kind of superstitious terror for statuary of all kinds. No ancient Iconoclast or modern Calvinist could have looked on the outside of the Abbey Church (if I mistake not, the principal church at Bath is so called,) with more horror than the image of Jacob’s Ladder, with all its angels, presented to my infant eye. My uncle9 effectually combated my terrors, and formally introduced me to a statue of Neptune, which perhaps still keeps guard at the side of the Avon, where a pleasure-boat crosses to Spring Gardens.”

“A sweet retreat”—Spring Gardens (again I quote Miss Lydia)—“laid out in walks, and ponds, and parterres of flowers, and hard by the Pamprom is a coffee-house for the ladies, but my aunt says young girls are not admitted, inasmuch as the conversation turns upon politics, scandal, philosophy, and other subjects above our capacity.” Is aunt Janet old enough and clever enough for the company, I wonder? And Walter—what toys did he mostly covet in the Orange Grove?

The passage about the effect of sculpture upon him is intensely interesting to me, partly as an indication of the state of his own nascent imagination, partly as illustrative of the power of religious sculpture, meant to terrify, on the minds of peasant children of high faculty. But I cannot dwell on this point here: I must get on to his first sight of a play. The third Fors—still favourable to him—appoints it to be “As you like it.”

A never-to-be-forgotten delight, influencing him in his whole nature thenceforward. It is uncle Robert’s doing this, aunt Jessie having been probably doubtful on the matter, but irresistibly coaxed. Uncle Robert has much to answer for! How much, I can’t tell you to-day; nor for a while now, for I have other matters on hand in the next Fors or two—Glacier theory, and on the road to it I must not let you forget the broom-market between Berne and Thun; and I’ve got to finish my notes on Friedrich and his father, who take more noticing than I expected; besides that I’ve Friedrich II. of Germany to give some account of; and all my Oxford work besides. I can only again and again beg the many valued correspondents whose letters I must abruptly answer, to remember that not one word on any of these subjects can be set down without care; and to consider what the length of a day is, under existing solar arrangements.

Meantime, here is a point for you to think of. The boy interrupts the first scene of the play by crying aloud, “An’t they brothers?”—(the third Fors had appointed for him that one day he should refuse to speak to his own;)—and long remembers the astonishment with which he “looked upon the apathy of the elder part of our company, who, having the means, did not spend every evening at the theatre.”

How was it that he never could write a Play?