keg mounted on the table without a moment’s delay, and gentle and simple, not forgetting the dominie, continued carousing about it until daylight streamed in upon the party.  Sir Walter Scott seldom failed, when I saw him in company with his Liddesdale companions, to mimic with infinite humour the sudden outburst of his old host on hearing the clatter of horses’ feet, which he knew to indicate the arrival of the keg, the consternation of the dame, and the rueful despair with which the young clergyman closed the book."[5]

No wonder old Mr. Scott felt some doubt of his son’s success at the bar, and thought him more fitted in many respects for a “gangrel scrape-gut."[6]

In spite of all this love of excitement, Scott became a sound lawyer, and might have been a great lawyer, had not his pride of character, the impatience of his genius, and the stir of his imagination rendered him indisposed to wait and slave in the precise manner which the prepossessions of solicitors appoint.

For Scott’s passion for romantic literature was not at all the sort of thing which we ordinarily mean by boys’ or girls’ love of romance.  No amount of drudgery or labour deterred Scott from any undertaking on the prosecution of which he was bent.  He was quite the reverse, indeed, of what is usually meant by sentimental, either in his manners or his literary interests.  As regards the history of his own country he was no mean antiquarian.  Indeed he cared for the mustiest antiquarian researches—­of the mediaeval kind—­so much, that in the depth of his troubles he speaks of a talk with a Scotch antiquary and herald as one of the things which soothed him most.  “I do not know anything which relieves the mind so much from the sullens as trifling discussions about antiquarian old womanries.  It is like knitting a stocking, diverting the mind without occupying it."[7] Thus his love of romantic literature was as far as possible from that of a mind which only feeds on romantic excitements; rather was it that of one who was so moulded by the transmitted and acquired love of feudal institutions with all their incidents, that he could not take any deep interest in any other fashion of human society.  Now the Scotch law was full of vestiges and records of that period,—­was indeed a great standing monument of it; and in numbers of his writings Scott shows with how deep an interest he had studied the Scotch law from this point of view.  He remarks somewhere that it was natural for a Scotchman to feel a strong attachment to the principle of rank, if only on the ground that almost any Scotchman might, under the Scotch law, turn out to be heir-in-tail to some great Scotch title or estate by the death of intervening relations.  And the law which sometimes caused such sudden transformations, had subsequently a true interest for him of course as a novel writer, to say nothing of his interest in it as an antiquarian and historian who loved to repeople