As Scott grew up, entered the classes of the college, and began his legal studies, first as apprentice to his father, and then in the law classes of the University, he became noticeable to all his friends for his gigantic memory,—­the rich stores of romantic material with which it was loaded,—­his giant feats of industry for any cherished purpose,—­his delight in adventure and in all athletic enterprises,—­his great enjoyment of youthful “rows,” so long as they did not divide the knot of friends to which he belonged, and his skill in peacemaking amongst his own set.  During his apprenticeship his only means of increasing his slender allowance with funds which he could devote to his favourite studies, was to earn money by copying, and he tells us himself that he remembered writing “120 folio pages with no interval either for food or rest,” fourteen or fifteen hours’ very hard work at the very least,—­expressly for this purpose.

In the second year of Scott’s apprenticeship, at about the age of sixteen, he had an attack of haemorrhage, no recurrence of which took place for some forty years, but which was then the beginning of the end.  During this illness silence was absolutely imposed upon him,—­two old ladies putting their fingers on their lips, whenever he offered to speak.  It was at this time that the lad began his study of the scenic side of history, and especially of campaigns, which he illustrated for himself by the arrangement of shells, seeds, and pebbles, so as to represent encountering armies, in the manner referred to (and referred to apparently in anticipation of a later stage of his life than that he was then speaking of) in the passage from the introduction to the third canto of Marmion which I have already given.  He also managed so to arrange the looking-glasses in his room as to see the troops march out to exercise in the meadows, as he lay in bed.  His reading was almost all in the direction of military exploit, or romance and mediaeval legend and the later border songs of his own country.  He learned Italian and read Ariosto.  Later he learned Spanish and devoured Cervantes, whose “novelas,” he said, “first inspired him with the ambition to excel in fiction;” and all that he read and admired he remembered.  Scott used to illustrate the capricious affinity of his own memory for what suited it, and its complete rejection of what did not, by old Beattie of Meikledale’s answer to a Scotch divine, who complimented him on the strength of his memory.  “No, sir,” said the old Borderer, “I have no command of my memory.  It only retains what hits my fancy; and probably, sir, if you were to preach to me for two hours, I would not be able, when you finished, to remember a word you had been saying.”  Such a memory, when it belongs to a man of genius, is really a sieve of the most valuable kind.  It sifts away what is foreign and alien to his genius, and assimilates what is suited to it.  In his very last days, when he