he mastered Latin pretty fairly.  After a time spent at the High School, Edinburgh, Scott was sent to a school at Kelso, where his master made a friend and companion of him, and so poured into him a certain amount of Latin scholarship which he would never otherwise have obtained.  I need hardly add that as a boy Scott was, so far as a boy could be, a Tory—­a worshipper of the past, and a great Conservative of any remnant of the past which reformers wished to get rid of.  In the autobiographical fragment of 1808, he says, in relation to these school-days, “I, with my head on fire for chivalry, was a Cavalier; my friend was a Roundhead; I was a Tory, and he was a Whig; I hated Presbyterians, and admired Montrose with his victorious Highlanders; he liked the Presbyterian Ulysses, the deep and politic Argyle; so that we never wanted subjects of dispute, but our disputes were always amicable.”  And he adds candidly enough:  “In all these tenets there was no real conviction on my part, arising out of acquaintance with the views or principles of either party....  I took up politics at that period, as King Charles II. did his religion, from an idea that the Cavalier creed was the more gentlemanlike persuasion of the two.”  And the uniformly amicable character of these controversies between the young people, itself shows how much more they were controversies of the imagination than of faith.  I doubt whether Scott’s convictions on the issues of the Past were ever very much more decided than they were during his boyhood; though undoubtedly he learned to understand much more profoundly what was really held by the ablest men on both sides of these disputed issues.  The result, however, was, I think, that while he entered better and better into both sides as life went on, he never adopted either with any earnestness of conviction, being content to admit, even to himself, that while his feelings leaned in one direction, his reason pointed decidedly in the other; and holding that it was hardly needful to identify himself positively with either.  As regarded the present, however, feeling always carried the day.  Scott was a Tory all his life.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vi. 172-3.  The edition referred to is throughout the edition of 1839 in ten volumes.]

[Footnote 2:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, x. 241.]

[Footnote 3:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, i. 243-4.]

[Footnote 4:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, i. 128.]

CHAPTER II.

YOUTH—­CHOICE OF A PROFESSION.