the history, legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a finished antiquarian.  The bent and limitations of his genius were early determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its object.  At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript ballads.  His education in romance dated from the cradle.  His lullabies were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers, and his Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay’s “Tea-table Miscellany,” upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly.  The ballad of “Hardiknute,” in this collection, he knew by heart before he could read.  “It was the first poem I ever learnt—­the last I shall ever forget.”  Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the poems of Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory “whole duans of the one and cantos of the other.”  “Spenser,” he says, “I could have read forever.  Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society.”  A little later Percy’s “Reliques” fell into his hands, with results that have already been described.[3]

As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, he began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon “all that was adventurous and romantic,” and in particular upon “everything which touched on knight-errantry.”  For two or three years he used to spend his holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur’s Seat or Salisbury Crags, where they read together books like “The Castle of Otranto” and the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to each other “interminable tales of battles and enchantments” and “legends in which the martial and the miraculous always predominated.”  The education of Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott’s first novel, was confessedly the novelist’s own education.  In the “large Gothic room” which was the library of Waverley Honour, the young book-worm pored over “old historical chronicles” and the writings of Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became “well acquainted with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on romantic fiction—­of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful imagination.”

Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott’s studies.  “To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in,” he writes, “I had always added the study of history, especially as connected with military events.”  He interested himself, for example, in the art of fortification; and when confined to his bed by a childish illness, found amusement in modelling fortresses and “arranging shells and seeds and pebbles so as to represent encountering armies. . . .  I fought my way thus through Vertot’s ’Knights of Malta’—­a book which, as it hovered between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me.”